Cable, Infomercial, Commercial, The Descending Pyramid

A still picture is worth a thousand words, or maybe three thousand, or even more!

Sometimes I see a picture in my mind, or better yet, one on my screen, and it floods me with ideas.

The truth of it is one story.  The other truths of it may be ten others.  Then come the little tendrils that reach out and link with my imagination!

But put that moving picture in a box with a bunch of other moving pictures and after a while it stifles my imagination.

I have no tv except for the movies I choose to watch on it with my dvd player or Roku box.  The difference that makes, is pretty amazing, considering the fact that I never was one for just leaving the set running.

Just knowing that Jeopardy was on at 4:30, or that one of the few dramas I enjoyed came on at a certain time, placed restrictions on my life.  I found myself trying to be sure I was available to watch them.

At first I really missed my favorite shows and I even missed those rare times when I wanted to kick back and stare mindlessly at the boob tube.  Now I find that instead of missing it, I expect what I watch to be something uninterrupted by commercials and something that is particularly interesting to me.

I had become so addicted to the tv that when cable charged me for just having it, I paid.  Then I realized that a huge percentage of the shows I paid for were there to sell me something!  And finally I understood that even if a show was not an infomercial, almost half of it was taken up by commercials!  With cable television I paid and paid and paid and honestly only got a couple hours of real decent viewing pleasure a week.

I’ll admit that is because I don’t care for reality shows where people pretend to be living real lives in front of the camera while they act as bizarrely as possible to keep people watching.  I also don’t care for fake sports shows, or variety shows where the audience votes on who might be good enough to hear or see again.  I don’t need to be watching food shows where people cook and I would be better off dancing myself than watching them dance.  So I was never a prime candidate for today’s television.

I do love movies and I do love concerts, but I love them more when the commercials are not so many and so long that I forget what I’m watching and move on during them, forgetting the other show was even on until later when I remember I didn’t see the end.

So now, even a still picture that I enjoy, floods my imagination with thoughts.  I’ll admit when I am somewhere there is a cable television I can get caught up with mindless watching way too easily, but for now that temptation is out of my immediate world.