The thing of it is, we could have been spending it on books all along.
Watched the most recent episode of Angel (which is fun these days in a way that Buffy, sadly, isn’t) through a haze of static.
We watched Angel through a haze of static because a couple of weeks ago I asked Jenn if we’d gotten a cable bill recently. —We’ve just swapped bill-paying duties from her to me, so a couple of things still needed sorting out, and while it was possible that a cable bill had slipped through the cracks, it seemed odd that two whole months’ worth would not turn up. So I called AT&T Broadband and discovered via the chirpy answering recording that it had been bought out by Comcast or somesuch.
So sue me. I don’t read my junk mail.
I asked for a new statement and got it, last week. For four months’ worth. $134 and change. Wrote them a check back. Mailed it off. Came home today, checked email, checked voice mail, twiddled with a couple of things. Got dinner ready. Turned on the television for some background yammer. Got the blue screen of death.
So I called and was on hold while the pasta water boiled and when the nice person came on the phone I asked why we didn’t have cable. And was told it was because I hadn’t paid my bill. There was no record, apparently, of my previous call, when I’d asked for a new statement, and told them I hadn’t been getting one. “We’ve sent them out every month on the 14th,” she said. I tried to explain the bit again about how we hadn’t been getting bills and I understood that maybe it was because of the changeover from AT&T to Comcast which I hadn’t even been aware of until I’d called to ask for a new statement. “We’ve had TV commercials and everything,” she said.
She never got around to explaining why I’d never gotten a notice of cancellation mailed to me, or a phone call from them wondering where my money was.
We haven’t been watching cable all that much, lately. That ’70s Show in reruns while I cook, maybe, because Jenn likes it so much; Buffy reruns on FX. First-run Buffy and Angel. Gilmore Girls now and again; if the damn thing doesn’t get turned off on a Thursday night, an episode of Scrubs. I tried that new Lucky the other night, which, eh. But Firefly is dead and Farscape is dead and anyway coming out of college when we never had money for cable; we watched videotapes every now and then and otherwise, the box was cold. TVs, we discovered, are big dead presences in rooms when they aren’t on. If you put them up high—on top of those rickety pressboard entertainment towers you buy at Circuit City, say—it’s paradoxically less noticeable; or you can cover them with a tapestry or something when not watching them. Just flip up the cloth when you want to put in Duck Soup or Metropolitan for the umpteenth time. Video wallpaper. Comfort food. —We went to Sara and Steve’s one night to watch Tom Waits on Letterman. They hauled out a tiny television from some back room and hooked it to the cable jack coming out of the wall in an unused corner. I cocked an eyebrow at the relatively large color set sitting dark on top of their VCR and under their DVD player. “Doesn’t hook up to cable,” said Steve. He pointed at the little set, where Letterman was sweeping a dud joke off-camera. “We’ve hauled that thing out twice, for New Year’s,” he said. “And September 11th,” said Sara.
“So why do you have the cable jack?” asked Jenn.
They shrugged. “Comes with the condo,” said Steve. “We couldn’t get them to turn it off.”
And the thing of it is, we haven’t been watching television all that much. —It was Buffy that got us back into the habit, dammit. Jenn and Barry way back in 1997 caught the first showing of episode two on a whim and said hey! This doesn’t suck! And cajoled the rest of us one at a time into watching it. By the time of the first season finale, we were group-watching, a microcosmic echo of those massive geek outings back at Oberlin, where we’d sign out the massive projection TV in the Mudd Library AV Room for showings of Star Trek: The Next Generation. (Only much more satisfying.) (And you should probably note the rather sloppy use of the first person plural throughout; at times it means me and Jenn, at times it means me and Jenn and Barry and Sarah and Charles and Matt and Brad in various subsets, and just then it meant a whole helluva lot of people I knew in college who all teased me mercilessly for looking like Wesley Crusher. Verb. sap. and all that.) —By the midpoint of second season Buffy, we were hooked, and hooked good. Tuesday nights were sacrosanct. You didn’t call any of us at 8 pm because we just wouldn’t answer the phone. It is not at all an exaggeration to state that Jenn and I first got cable ourselves so that we could watch Buffy without the static and occasional unwatchable nights we’d had with a simple antenna.
But the thing about having cable is once you’ve got it, you might as well use it. We got caught up on DS9, say, which is the best of the various Treks, yes, but I don’t think has aged all that well. We watched a lot of Friends in reruns, and Seinfelds, and Roseannes; we got hooked on Xena for a while. Tried Farscape on a whim and found it was better than not, and then somewhere in its second season we got that ohmygod rush again: this show rocked. Friday nights, out on the town? I think not. At least, not without setting up the VCR to record while we were away. Angel we started watching because, well, it’s a Joss Whedon show, and ended up enjoying it in its own right, but Tuesday nights were an utter wash when both it and Buffy were on the WB: that’s two hours of television right there, not counting the hour or so of syndicated sitcoms in the 7 – 8 cook-and-eat bloc. G vs. E we both liked a lot, but it got cancelled. Jules Verne was fun until it got weirdly obsessed with Dumas and shunted to one o’clock in the morning and then cancelled. Cupid—remember Cupid? I don’t remember why we started watching it, a whim again, I guess, maybe because we’d liked Jeremy Piven in Ellen which, you know, we’d been watching, but it was a great little show, and it got cancelled, too. We loved Sports Night, until it got cancelled, and Sports Night led us to West Wing which we loved even more. We never clicked with Smallville, despite the cheeky amusement value of a show that knows it’s nothing but an engine for slash; we checked out that Iron Chef show, which we did click with. Wow. AbFab reruns on Oxygen? Okay. Commercial break—skip up to AMC, there’s an old spaghetti Western on. Surf back down to the mid 50s, where TNT and FX and the Superstation hang out—what the fuck? Wesley Snipes, with a sword, slicing Stephen Dorff in half with lots of bad computerized blood effects? Jesus, this is so bad you have to watch. There’s a Law and Order on every hour tonight. Or we could skip back down to the Cartoon Network—Dexter’s Laboratory, Powerpuff Girls, Samurai Jack…
We got really excited about Firefly. The idea of Whedon and co., stretching their wings a little, the background and backstory we’d seen bits and pieces of, what we knew about a couple of the actors (Gina Torres, Ron Glass, Adam Baldwin) going into it—it had us buzzed. The first couple of episodes were a bit rocky, and then it started hitting its stride, and it got better and better. We were getting that ohmygod rush again. Friday nights were going to be shot once more. —And then it got cancelled.
Which wasn’t the straw here, no, but as I said, we hadn’t been watching television all that much. We’d been leaving it on, looking at something out of curiosity, surfing up or down to the next interesting thing. The times you actually watch television—when you sit down and know you’re not getting up for a half hour, or a full hour, or until the tape ends, when you’re committed to ride whatever story’s unfolding in front of you—we hadn’t been doing that through cable all that much. Buffy still, yes, but out of grim loyalty these days more than anything else, and anyway it’s about to go gently into that good night. Angel, but it isn’t a big deal to miss a week or two. West Wing—what happened to that one? Right, we just sort of stopped watching. Farscape? Gone. Firefly? Gone. And what else was up there on the television screen?
Right. Law and Order and Wesley Snipes sneering under some badass sunglasses. Morimoto rolling some deft sushi with asparagus in it or something. Bubbles and Buttercup and Blossom riffing on old Beatles songs. Axminster hunting MacGuyver, and Christopher Lloyd channelling Reverend Jim under inches of Klingon makeup for the umpteenth time.
For this we were paying nearly $40 a month.
So I told the nice woman on the other end of the line, who insisted they’d been sending us bills we hadn’t gotten, who seemed to think it weird that I hadn’t seen the TV commercials telling us Comcast had bought AT&T, who couldn’t explain why we’d gotten no mailed notice about cutting off our service, or a phone call ditto, I told her to cancel our account.
We can get The Sopranos on videotape from the library, you know.
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Okay, I get it. You're never going to finish watching that *Lazarus Man* tape. Does that mean I can have it back ? :p
You miss my point. Those Lazarus Man episodes are on tape. No cable necessary.
You miss MY point. Now that you're cable-less, you have no further excuses for not watching.
(Don't worry, we've also got the MST3K versions of *Master Ninja* and *Fugitive Alien* --Parts 1 AND 2 !!!-- available as needed for existential boredom and/or extended jobless stretches.) ;)
Hey, fellow Obies! If Angel's fuzziness grows intolerably annoying, most cable companies will let you get 'reception' cable; pay a nominal monthly fee and just get the regular local stations.
Though how anyone can live without BBC America is beyond me. :)
Sadly, we don't get BBC America with our basic cable package here; unless we're willing to fork over another $15.
Jenn wouldn't let me cancel the cable: she's hooked on TLC and Discovery Channel shows about decorating, decorating your friends' living room, decorating your husband's room while he fishes, saving pregnant women from complicated births, surgically removing golf clubs from a man's rectum, dumping gallons of blood into someone who is bleeding to death.... Naturally I am in my studio drawing or blogging or simply not trying to vomit.
Blaming her is unfair, of course. I have to watch The Daily Show and Trigger Happy and South Park. And if I forget to set up the tape machine to record Gilmore Girls before I go to my therapy session, then said therapy is wasted. As a political cartoonist, I feel obligated to log in some time for CNN, FOXNews, etc. Just to see what's going on or how badly what's going on is being reported.
And I found myself watching CMT for a full half hour the other night. Saw Toby Keith and Willie Nelson in a video acting as private investigators hunting a rapist-murderer—with a dorky sidekick, judo chops and long barrelled six-guns! Stuff like that answers certain psychological and cultural questions I have about my compatriots. It doesn't explain it, but it adds data to the computations.
Just Another Tentacle of the Octopus
Kip often tells me that Comcast is evil. He even blogged about his experiences with their evil a while ago. And I have no argument with his assessment, but in the marketplace, one has many options of evil; that one...