Creative Psychosis

“The end is near, my little friend. I shall unscrew the cable from your brain and send you back to your bloated master.”

These are the words I might speak tonight to the last cable box in my apartment when it gets disconnected and returned to Cablevision. No, this is not a pitch that I am not switching to satellite instead. I am getting rid of the multitude of choices on cable altogether. To be more specific, I asked my fiancé that we eliminate the Family package of our cable service (aka 400 channels of never-ending channel surfing), and have only the Basic version (all of the channel a normal TV used to pick up, but with clear reception).

For my area in New York, here are the costs:
- Family Cable $45.00
- Broadcast Basic $9.00
In the grand scheme of things, saving $36 a month (or $432 a year) is nice on the budget, but honestly that’s not why I wanted to get rid of the Family package.

The main reason is that when I’m older and I look back on the portfolio of my life, I don’t want to say that a healthy percentage was spent watching programs which benefit me only in the short term. Be honest with yourself—other than momentary entertainment, what greater good has television done for you? Could you not have been doing something more productive?

Basically, up to this point, I have concluded two things:
(A) My girl and I only watch two shows each week (24 and Alias), both on basic.
(B) Every other time we turn on the TV is just for pure vegetative state. We turn it on, and because there are 900 options to choose from, we’re bound to find something moderately interesting to waste our lives to. It took me some time to convince her of this, but eventually she decided the logic was true.

This decision was not without debate. Cable has always been such a vast tool of endless entertainment… movies, sitcoms, self-help shows, news, sports, cartoons, and on and on. When I was younger, I didn’t get Cable until I was in high school, so I remember how great it was to visit my buddy’s house and watch MTV and HBO and Cinemax. Of course, then I was naive, and believed in the system to be pure and concurrent with the ways of American life.

While I still recognize that Cable TV, and its’ evil clone Satellite TV, have become a vital artery of American culture, I have chosen to resist it. Does that make me less patriotic to not be a daily vegetable? I hope not. But then, I know I am in a tiny minority with this choice. Most people could not give up cable if they tried.

But I hope more people do resist cable… there’s way too much in life that our scattered years could not even begin to explore. You sure won’t get there by watching reruns of I Love The 80’s every week.