I honestly cannot remember a time when I lived without cable television.
Even when I was hunkered down in a one-room apartment on Nichols Street, eating Ramen noodles every night and existing on a telemarketer’s salary, I had cable. True, it was on a tiny black-and-white TV with an old-fangled channel knob, but it was 13 channels of cable television, nonetheless.
Whenever I’d move into a new place, cable was the first utility I’d call. Typically, the TV would be hooked up before the bed was even moved in. A lad can get by without sleep, heat or food, but survive without 24-hour TV entertainment? Never!
Of course, cable has evolved since then to the point where even the most basic packages come with 300-plus channels, not including the scrambled channels you sometimes watch at 3 in the morning, you dirty bird.
To me, more channels were decidedly better, not because I’m an entertainment junkie but because TV provided the soundtrack to my life and it was good to have options. Television to me has always been white noise, mere background chatter to fill the unnerving silence. I never cared much what was on as long as SOMETHING was there to drown out the unnerving hum of my thoughts.
In its way, television is like an opiate and two weeks ago, my mean, terrible wife took that fix away and flushed it down the toilet. I heard the casts of “Cheers,” “M*A*S*H” and “Two and a Half Men” screaming as they vanished into the black void of the pipes, but then a strange thing happened.
I didn’t care very much at all.
The strange thing about something like cable television is that we’re conditioned to believe that we absolutely must have it. You had it as a toddler, you had it as a teen and you sure as hell need it now that you’re a full-grown adult with ear hair and everything. Unhook yourself and you might as well move off into a tiny cabin in the mountains where you’ll grow a giant beard and die of boredom with a book in your hands.
A book! Can you imagine?
As it turns out, the silence that descended when cable went away wasn’t as horrifying as I’d always thought it would be. No more three-minute barrages of commercials telling me what I should eat, drink and use to combat embarrassing foot odor. No more screeching talk show hosts and no more insipid reality shows about superficial people doing superficial things.
When you unplug the cable, you really get a sense of how hypnotic it is, and how manipulative. They don’t call it TV programming for nothing, yo. People get paid a whole lot of money to beam just the right messages into your head. You, in turn, pay a lot of money to receive them.
So, I’m feeling all smug and special about this break from the programming when, come to find out, it’s a not-so-new trend that’s going on all over the place. People are kicking cable to the curb and getting by with simple TV antennas or with services like Roku, Netflix and Hulu. There are at least three people in my life who have not watched cable television for five years or more and they haven’t grown giant beards!
As always, I’m late to the party, just like I was in the day when cable reigned: I didn’t start watching “Breaking Bad” until 2016, three years after the show ended and its many fans were over the horrible thing that happened to Hank.
Still, better late than never, right?
I’m going to miss the scrambled channels at 3 a.m., though. I found them soothing.
Mark LaFlamme is a Sun Journal staff writer. You can email him at mlaflamme@sunjournal.com, but don’t tell him about the horrible thing that happens to Don Draper.
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