2004-06-24 - 10:51 a.m.

I don�t watch TV.

This admission has shocked more people than I ever could have expected. It never seems to sink in. Nearly every day, now, someone will start asking, �Did you see this? Did you see that?�

�I don�t watch TV.�

�Oh.�

Cut to five minutes later.

�Ohmagawd, did you see��

�I don�t watch TV.�

�Oh.�

I�m not one of these television activists: �That shiny devil box is destroying the minds of our little ones. In my day, we played stick ball, and we didn�t need no play by play, I�ll tell ya that!� I just never bothered with getting cable. Mostly because I never bothered to get paid enough to afford it.

I tried the rabbit ears for a while, and while I had a roommate this became in interesting puzzle. One of us sitting on the couch, trying to make sense of the blurred flickering images of Sarah Michelle Gellar and the rest of the cast of Buffy, while the other tinkered with the antennae. Objects at one point hung, taped or otherwise attached to the Rabbit ears in an attempt to get reception: pan lids, the pan itself, excessive amounts of tin foil, a broken Playstation 2 controller, ourselves. The only workable solution seemed to be for one of us to sit there hanging onto the top of the TV while the other enjoyed the program. I read a good portion of �Swan�s Way� with �The Practice� on in the background.

Now that I live by myself, I just can�t be bothered. I get most of the news and the weather from the radio, which does not require various make-shift attachments, and I get my entertainment from�well, I�d love to say fine literature, but I�ll buckle and say, my gynourmous collection of DVD�s.

I was robbed a couple years back, and while the thieves had the good will to leave my leather jacket behind, (I�m a small. I found the jacket off it�s hook, and tossed into a corner. My guess is the interlopers rummaging through my stuff weren�t exactly petite.) my entire DVD collection went up missing.

Now in a new apartment with no roommate for company, I had to find some form of entertainment. The most cost effective: Season three of Buffy: nearly twenty hours of entertainment for fifty dollars. That works out to two fifty an hour. Your average movie: twenty bucks for two hours of entertainment. Ten bucks an hour. It�s the difference between a Park avenue hooker, and a East Village hooker. Both fun, but one�s a better deal. (Ask for Marjorie, and try to look past the name.)

Television programs, in DVD form, are now my new crack. I�m up to eleven box sets. Call it the unity of effect. On a Sunday I can watch the entire arch of a season of television without any interruption, outside of the biological need to pee.

It�s pure and it�s wonderful. Just don�t invite friends over for the mass viewings. Somehow my compatriots don�t seem to find spending seven hours watching Gilmore Girls episodes back to back, while I lounge in my boxer shorts eating the broken remains of a can of Pringles, to be all that thrilling, despite the growing sexual tension between Luke and Loralai. Fuck Max Medina, will these two crazy kids ever get together?

Then again, the simple fact that I own Gilmore Girls might be the deal breaker. I need to get season one of American Chopper to balance out the estrogen content.

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