You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy.™
A life governed by television.
I know a person with no college degree and no tangible work skills.
This person stays at home and suckles off the teet of others.
This person is not confined to a wheel chair or handicapped in any way.
This human could work, could volunteer to help others, could earn a living and be a productive member of society.
But this American citizen has chosen to escape from reality.
This person watches TV as if watching TV is a highly paid, respected profession.
They sit in front of the television from 7am till 11pm. Some say this person is disinterested or lazy. Some could argue this person is dedicated to a specific task.
The Flat Screen is on incessantly, filling the room with a radiation glow created in a Hollywood sound stage.
Wife Swap and Jersey Shore and the Closer fill the DVR’s to do list.
The little orange light on the front of the machine is always on, piercing through the darkness, sending a silent message that the solid state circuitry of recording is commencing as planned.
Survivor and House and Chuck.
Record On!
So many programs on so many satellite channels, it’s difficult to manage it all.
The television junkie is bright. Of that I am sure, since it almost takes a PhD to coordinate all the shows and all the times and all the networks. The television junkie maneuvers two shows in and out of the same time slot, as easily as an air traffic controller moves two Jumbo jets out of the same air space.
Thanks God. Disaster averted!
Fringe. NCIS. Kitchen Nightmares.
Watch out people, that DVR is smoking!
This television crack head deletes programs with one thumb while programming more banality with the other. Who says it doesn’t take dexterity to watch TV all day long.
Dr. Phil. Burn Notice. CSI Miami.
Can someone order more hours in a day?
The zombie human can talk on the phone while reading a book while pushing the necessary buttons that record up to 70 hours of programming.
Somewhere between the station identifications and mid day ads for lawyers, this sad human eats and attends to personal hygiene.
Prisoners confined to an 8 by 8 foot cell don’t have as much free time to watch and record and delete all the shows that are watched and recorded and deleted in this domicile of the absurd.
If the surgeon general could put a warning on the screen, he would.
Caution: watching more than 20 hours of TV a day can be dangerous to your health.
Your eyes could loosen in their sockets. Your face could become flushed from radiation poisoning. Your brain could become soft like apple sauce from a constant neural feeding tube of drek.
Warnings real or imagined, this viewer soldiers on, manipulating a DVR menu like an architect fine tuning designs for an expansion bridge of non stop programming.
It’s sad. The television zombie could have been so much more.
In a world where TV is king, the clown of the couch strikes a lonely digital pose. It is here, in a hollow kingdom, where commercials break up the monotony and a remote control is a new millennium scepter, that this flat screen loser is both court jester and symbol of a wasted life.
And that is crazy.