Farseeing, TV or maybe not TV.

4/3/02 7:43 AM Sitting in the coffee shop of the Giant Eagle Supermarket on Camp Horne Road about one-half mile up the hill climb to where I work.

I am always tempted to make things clear, so let me make it clear before I go into this tirade, that I am almost no social critic, have few social graces and have nothing against television. I grew up watching from December Bride til Outer Limits and enjoying, and also that I don't give a damn whether or not viewing causes violence in our children. Imagine that violence in the world, what an anomaly.

As I sit here just trying to write a simple entry into my daily journal I am distracted horribly. Someone, with the intellect of a mollusk thought it would be a good idea to have a TV hanging in the corner of an ersatz coffee shop in a supermarket. To compound this act of architectural befuddlement another person of questionable intellect thought it necessary to turn said TV on. I won't gripe about the fact that no one is ever behind the coffee bar here to serve you a too small plastic cup for too much money so that you can select from a too meager array of brewed coffee beans in shiny stainless steel covered hot pots. I will not bitch because Babcock Blvd. was teeming with ridiculous traffic holding me back from my habitual morning coffee joint and journal.

Stranding, I might add in a huff, if I was complaining, me among the fruits and vegetables, the dread sound of Musak to my right over the speakers atop the coffee counter and the far more familiar grating sound of the TV to the left. A ridiculous thriller mystery. I cannot help but watch. A guy picks up a gun off the floor and points it at a lady who has gun in her hand covering him and says, "Put it down!" in a voice stern enough that she does. I bite my tongue and enjoy the pain in the face of the really insipid writing that has manifested itself. Hey, I take it all back; maybe I don't like TV all that much.

It is a social question after all. Where have we come in America that we cannot bear the natural ambient supermarket noises? The sound of the workers in the deli and bakery, ovens hissing, saws cutting lunch meat, hard four wheel carts clanking over terra cotta floors, people pushing grocery carts with one of the front wheels defective, thump squeal squeak around the store. Why must we have the constant application of musical wall paper, the comforting sounds of commercials, sitcoms, and uninteresting mysteries? Are we puppy dogs who must have the sound of a clock in our sleeping baskets to remind us of mother's heart beat?

Several years ago I purchased the Whole Platinum Package from the cable company. Every time I called them with a problem they would explain that some portion of my service that I had been hitherto receiving wasn't part of the Gold or Silver or Pewter Package that I was paying for. "Look, I said, to the phone representative, what would it cost to just receive everything?" "Well, Mr. Coluccio," he said with an earnest voice, "I believe that at this minute as we speak the High Plateau Platinum Exclusive Service would be ten dollars less than you are paying now."
I knew then that I had crossed over into the new economics. "Oh." I said.

I sat fat, serious inner glow, in front of the digital blinking box with about twenty or thirty channels full of movies. After some cursory viewing it was revealed to me in a kind of glittering mental swelling of my frontal lobe, that very often the same channels, like the birth of identical twins were merely delayed, in this case proving that my simile isn’t strictly true, because of time zone. Hence the very descriptive names HBO East and HBO West. Okay, I thought with my new clarity, no wonder it's cheaper. The economics weren’t so new. New speak, I guess.

A friend of mine once called with a request that the cable company add The Science Fiction Channel to their offerings. The sage representative tied to the other end of the phone said, “I'm really tired of all you people calling about this, we just don't have enough demand for that channel to be added.” Cable is really a corner of the through-the-looking-glass world.

Now I have a godzillion movies showing like the mirror scene in Citizen Kane, endlessly repeating themselves, hour after hour, bad movies into horrible turn. I watch hungrily for a change. Saturday night, all the movie channels assure me. I watch and despair as they roll out movies that I have either seen in the theaters or as a part of my growing DVD collection.

I cannot watch the vestiges of network TV. Writing and production is done by lowest common denominator. Bean counters who pass for creative people choose. BUT, and this is the cruelest BUTT of all.

If the TV is on, I watch. It is tirelessly seductive. I had to make a decision that except for the news in the morning, which I have also stopped watching, not to turn the thing on. Sure enough my productivity has gone up. I am writing and reading more. Playing the guitar and the keyboard with the better proficiency that comes with practice.

The cable channels now repeat themselves, like a Zen tree falling in the forest. On the weekends I weaken and watch for a time. I am more cut off from American culture than I ever have been. I'll bet I couldn't even begin to fill out those TV crossword puzzles in TV Gude. Bereft of all contemporary culture, I create my own, which it turns out is what I was after all along.

Ciao! Superman just came on the tube and this new Lois Lane is quite a dish!