My kids wish that I was involved in a terrible car accident and was killed. That way they could order cable television, and I wouldn’t be able to stop them. No, maybe they don’t actually wish that I was dead, but they would like it if my job moved me to Alaska for a year, and then they could stay behind and order cable TV without me knowing.
Yes, I will admit it publicly: I don’t have cable TV. Thus I am a social leper. Saying you don’t have cable television is actually more offensive than admitting you have a criminal record. I have had people end conversations with me when they find out I don’t have cable or dish network or whatever the fandangled new technology is that streams endless hours of reality TV into people’s homes. TV watchers say I have no reference to relate with them in any way.
People ask me how I am able to get through the week without watching Ice Road Truckers or The Deadliest Catch. How can I get by without knowing what happens? Well, I can probably tell you what happens, and I haven’t seen either show. Let me guess: Trucker dudes drive trucks over frozen lakes, and fisherman dudes fish the tumultuous ocean. Tune in next week, when more dudes drive trucks and other dudes keep fishing? Sorry, maybe I’m just being completely ignorant, because I haven’t had the opportunity to enjoy the shows, but I’m not feeling like I’m missing much. I have my own boring life to live. I can’t spend two hours a week watching somebody else live their slightly less boring life.
But back to my poor, poor children and their underprivileged lives: Yes, it’s true I’m a total hypocrite for not letting them have cable when I did grow up with the magical black box. But that was back in the day when MTV was cool. Back then, MTV was just as advertised—music television—with music videos and news about bands. Now it is just one big commercial for zit cream and doesn’t have any rock videos at all, just reality TV about some kid who rides a skateboard and hates his mom. I can see kids on skateboards who hate their moms right in my front yard, but what I can’t see down the street is the White Stripes playing a concert, which is why people used to say, “I want my MTV.”
This all means that my kids are up my butt daily with the same request: “Dad, can we get cable?”
“Nope.”
“But we want to watch Hannah Montana!”
“You want to watch a show about the state of Montana?”
“No, stupid. We want to watch a show about Miley Cyrus, the singer.”
“I thought the singer was called Billy Ray Cyrus. He had that country song about his achy breaky heart.”
“No, Dad, that’s her dad. This is why we need cable—so you would know this sort of stuff.”
“Does her dad drive a fishing truck across a frozen lake?”
“No, Dad, you’re so stupid. I wish you were in Alaska driving a truck on a frozen lake. Then maybe we could have cable!”
“Ain’t gonna happen.”
I would like to tell you that I don’t have cable television because of some sort of social conscience reasoning or an academic ideal or something cool or intelligent like that. The fact of the matter is I don’t have cable TV because I am the absolute and complete biggest fan of it. Even though I just got finished blasting reality shows, I’m a total sucker for all of those shows. You put a 10-hour Ice Road Trucker marathon in front of me, and I won’t even get up to go to the bathroom. They could make a reality TV show about girls who do absolutely nothing, living in the Hollywood Hills, and I would watch that, too. Oh, I was just informed that is a show, surprisingly called The Hills, and I’m currently missing it. Darn it!
If we had cable, absolutely nothing would get done around my house. The trash wouldn’t even get taken out because I would be glued to the television, riveted by what happens on The Girls Next Door. I would completely ignore my wife, whom I love, and my kids. I wouldn’t share the remote, and I wouldn’t talk to anyone. My new best friends would be Jessie James and Dog the Bounty Hunter. I wouldn’t have any actual three-dimensional friends. Who’d want to hang out with me? I’d just sit on the couch and drool all over myself (totally and completely loving it).
Unfortunately for my kids, because I am a total junkie, I have to keep myself away from the crack that is television, and thus we can’t have cable in the house. I can’t watch in moderation—I only know how to binge on TV, so to battle with my addiction I have completely deleted the supply, which means that my kids have to go without cable. I feel bad for them. At school, their friends make fun of them because they didn’t see the latest episode of The Suite Life of Zach and Cody. Their friends assume that because we don’t have cable, we probably live in a cardboard box.
So, in the end, my kids miss out on SpongeBob SquarePants, but in trade, they get their dad all day, commercial free.
To make his life a challenge, send every season of The Deadliest Catch on DVD to the Santa Maria Sun, attn: Rob Krider..
This article appears in Aug 6-13, 2009.
