I think I’ve finally kicked the habit.  I haven’t watched television for over five months now, and I don’t miss it.  Except for a furtive glance at military television in Seoul (bad and in English) and some bizarre morning show in Japan (funny, but in Japanese) — my watching of the boob tube has been limited to DVD rentals.

Wanna know how I kicked the habit?  Moved to the Santa Monica mountains.  Lost all reception except for KCAL 9.  Immediately got tired of 24/7 car chases and court shows.  Watched a couple of very fuzzy shows and realized without the pretty colors, those laugh track sounded hollow.  And, finally couldn’t justify yet another monthly payment, this time only $49.95!, for satellite TV.  (Cable could have been mine for only $79.95 with about two channel choices.)

I know, I know, what am I doing instead.  No great works of literature are being written by kerosene light here.  Instead we’ve been watching some (blissfully commercial free) DVDs, reading books, training the dogs, and talking.

Now that I’ve kicked the habit of constant commercial background noise — my greatest fear is being sucked back in. Just the other night after watching an hour of season five of the Sopranos, I went downstairs, only to come back and find Adam watching some kind of car chase on channel 9.  He was, he says, just seeing what we were missing.  Apparently what we were ‘missing’ was some trite stories on lost cats, or murder victims, or some brown and black men being shuttled off in handcuffs.

Indeed, I felt very sorry for the house sitter, when I realized somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, that I forgot to mention we had no cable.

My greatest dilemma is if I get that great job interview at any of the networks I have left (CBS? MTV? — not such great luck with Viacom) is that I’ll have to read a million back issues of TV Guide to catch up on the latest in the dreck of popular culture.  Where does one get back issues of gossip mags?

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