Bundled together ,The phone,Internet and DirectTV I spend around 120/month and I have the basic channels, HBO,Showtime,Encoreand the Movie channel networks.
Man, there's only 24 hours a day, eight of which one usually spends working, and another eight during which one
should be sleeping, leaving eight.....during which time there's other things that need done, such as washing the dishes, vaccuuming the floor, walking the dog, chatting with the neighbors, pleasing the wife, signing the kids' school report cards, and whatever else.
Where does one have time to watch so much television?
Now, I will admit, I'm in unusual circumstances here, so far out of the mainstream of contemporary American culture that I'm walking along the banks, not even the soles of my shoes getting wet.
Being deaf, television has
never been any part of this life; at times, I've had television, and there was one brief period, 1991 until I took off for the socialist paradises of the workers and peasants a year and a half later, that I assiduously watched the boob-tube, several hours a day.....C-Span, usually the House of Representatives.
But other than that, television hasn't ever been anything attracting my attention.
I suspect it's because the attraction of television is--get this;
all the "diversity" workshops quote this figure--derived 80% from what one hears emanating from the box (the same for movies, shows, plays, whatnot). If one's cut off so much, the rest of it doesn't hold any appeal.
"Closed captioning" is perhaps okay with people who once could hear, but lost all or some of in life; it means nothing at all to a person who's never heard sound.
When in waiting rooms or other places with a large public television, I glance, and wonder.
It used to be that there was just one screen on television, focusing on one thing.
Now there's one big screen occupying the left side, two small screens, one on top of the other, occupying the right side, and a running stream of words on the bottom. And sometimes there's a second running stream of words on the bottom.
Fox does this; I dunno about other channels, but I suspect they do the same thing.
How is it possible to grasp all of this, without getting a headache, and without, inevitably, failing?
It's too much.
I grew up in a house without television. As far as I know, it wasn't that the parents had anything against teleivison, it seemed more so that, well, it was just something they forgot to buy when at the furniture store, much as sometimes one forgets to pick up a jar of peanut-butter at the grocery store.
And they didn't object to any of their children watching television; the brothers and sisters watched plenty of it--but still much much less than their peers--in other homes.
So I didn't grow up with television; I'm not sure why, only that it was probably a good thing.
The night man first landed on the moon in July 1969, my father wanted to watch it, and decided to go and watch it on the television in the employees' dining room of the hospital (where he was the administrator). I was a kid, and for some reason he thought it'd be good for me to see it too.
I wasn't that thrilled about it; I was of course interested in man landing on the moon and all that, but really, it was something that could wait until morning, when one could read all about it in the newspapers.
At the hospital, on our way to the dining room, one of the employees, who knew I appreciated such things, gave me a handful of old magazines her husband had found when cleaning out a deceased relative's house.
So the night of July 20, 1969, while my father and probably tens of millions of others were glued to the television screen, I was sitting next to him engrossed in reading a 1923 copy of
The Saturday Evening Post.
