When I was forced
to move I lost my cable. It came with the house. I know, Oh
the horror! The humanity! SmartAz lost his cable!!!
Yeah, someone call the United
Nations and see if they can get a team on this toot-sweet!
Okay, it's not of earth shattering
importance. I'm just surprised I care so much. We first got cable
when I was around 12. We had it for about 10 years, then I
didn't have it for about 10 years. During that cableless
period I thought, "What's the big deal? I don't watch much TV anyway.
I already have 20 over-the-air channels I'm not watching. Why pay to
have 100 more not to watch?" Such was my smug superiority over the TV
obsessed masses.
Then I moved here and -- lo and behold! --
cable was included with the house! What a wondrous discovery! So many
channels! So much entertainment and information! Oh, sweet Lord!, why
had you deprived me all this time?!?!?! Eli,
Eli, lama sabachthani? The movies, the retro-TV, the comedy,
the overwhelming plethora of news sources at my fingertips! Then
suddenly, without warning -- like a house falling on you and someone
snatching your ruby slippers -- It was all ripped away from me. I'm
again in the barren wasteland of the cableless.
But why this sudden shift from my previous
position? Why do I suddenly care about having cable? Has cable gotten
so much better over the past 12 years? En-oh, no. Actually it
may be worse. I think there are 3 main reasons I suddenly feel
deprived without cable. *
- Lack of over-the-air stations. Unlike Los Angeles,
where there are more than 20 broadcast stations, out here in
the desert south of Vegas there aren't any. Zero, zip,
zilch, mucho noda. Not locally, anyway. Some very
snowy flickery images can be picked up from Las Vegas, NV
and Phoenix, AZ. The only two stations which come in clearly
are both NBC (one from
each state) who apparently have repeater transponders nearby.
(I wonder why NBC is the only one who gives a rat's ass?)
Unfortunately, except for the occasional Conan
O'Brien, I very rarely watched NBC. The
only local TV channel -- meaning the only viable local news
and information -- is, you guessed it, cable only.
(Okay, if I had a faster modem, I could watch it on the
Internet, but I don't so it's moot.)
I can't help but think if I had the number of over-the-air
options I had in L.A. I still wouldn't care all that much about
cable. Yes, I'd miss FOX
News and all the movie options, but I think I could deal.
As it is I'm balancing on one leg, limbs splayed every which
way, just to get something akin to watching a drive-in movie
through a blizzard. Plus, I don't even have all the networks.
PBS and the channel I watched
the most, WB, are nowhere
to be seen. No Smallville,
no last few episode of Angel.
What the hell happened on High
School Reunion? (Don't tell me, I don't want to find out
this way.) The CBS and
ABC affiliates are so
difficult to snag in I don't even bother. (I guess I'll wait
for the DVD of Kingdom
Hospital to find out what happened.) And while I can kinda
see UPN, I'm not sure, but I
think I saw Enterprise's
resident Vulcan T'pol doing the Macarena
with Dick Cheney. There's a twist I didn't see
coming.
- The abruptness. When I lost cable in the 90's it was
due to my fiscal collapse during Daddy Bush's recession. It was
a financial decision I made after giving it thought and
deliberation. This time I suddenly had it ripped away from me.
Wait till my back is turned and pull out my appendix without
anesthesia, why don't you? It became just one more thing I had
to deal with during a very bad several months. Here was
something I was greatly enjoying, that would have been a
comfort to me in a time of great distress, and it too
was torn out of my life.
I had developed a certain routine that's been interrupted
against my will. It's like a hardcore alcoholic whose plane
crashes in the middle of the desert -- oh the withdrawal! Also,
I was on a nostalgia kick I can longer indulge. With cable I
could pretty much recreate my viewing past. "Ebenezer, I am
the Ghost of Television Past."
"Long past?"
"No. Your past -- um, you did pay your cable bill,
right?"
- The isolation. I hate not knowing what is going on.
I'm a news junkie. As inadequate as I felt the L.A. media had
become it was the Shakespeare of journalism compared to what I
have now. When I had cable, I still watched the
L.A. news I had watched before I moved. Living on the
border of three states we had channels from all three states.
Now I'm stuck with what I can pirouette in. The Vegas NBC
station is so bad, so devoid of sense of story, that when the
American
kidnap victim in Iraq escaped, they didn't even describe
how he did it. No tell of prying things open, no running across
the desert in search of the American military, nothing. Now
that's incompetent news coverage. As I mentioned, the
true local TV channel is cable only, so no joy there. They have
a lock on all the important coverage for the immediate area.
Basically, I have no idea what is happening locally,
nationally, or internationally. My intellectual life is being
stunted and it's affecting everything I do.
I checked into getting cable or DBS
satellite here. The prices shocked me. I'd be looking at $40/month
plus all the installation and connection charges (and possibly buying
equipment in the case of DBS) for just the basics. I just
can't justify that. $40/month for something I'd been essentially
getting free (included with my rental)? Even if I could afford
it, I don't think I could justify it. Frankly I'm not sure it's worth
it. I wish there were some type of à la carte service
where I could just pick the handful of stations I actually want to
watch. Clearly the technology for such an option exists. This making
people overpay through the nose for multiple channels they don't even
want is ridiculous.
Anyway, that is where my entertainment and
information life stands rights now. My TV entertainment consists
largely of borrowing DVDs from the library and digging into my video
collection. My news is limited to Internet and very poor distant
stations. Oh well, it gives me more time for blogging. You're all
thankful for that, right? Right?
Yours,
Gene Nash
P.S. You didn't really read this whole thing, did you? 
* Actually I had four reasons, only two of which are listed in the
three given. Darn my rapidly failing memory!