Plugged back in to the once unplugged

In May 2012 I’d had enough of cult television and cancelled my satellite subscription, leaving me with only “Netflix” movies. I lived in that bubble until just before Christmas 2016 when I decided to re-engage with the “media-ogre” world.

I had had four years of commercial-free living, save the banner along the right-hand panel of my favorite online weather website, which repeatedly depicted a computer-generated “before and after” wrinkled face of a woman in an advertisement for some obscure miracle facelift company. “Google” also had tried to influence me too, of course, mapping out my favorite go-to websites and placing them strategically along the top of any number of pages I visited. 

However, seeing as how I lived in a rather structured “online bubble” that involved learning about sailing, most of the advertising was for boring stuff like braided halyard lines or pulley wheels for my mast.

No tv satellite meant I didn’t watch comedy series, no “CSI” or “NCIS,” no hyped-up news programs, no Hollywood or music award shows, no cartoons, no political rhetoric, no drama. Life was simple and most of all my decisions about “stuff” weren’t based on what the “boob tube” told me to buy, say, do, or believe. 

This is not to say that I didn’t keep up with world events. I listened to the radio a lot, read the good old newspaper, or clicked the headlining news story online and scanned it for the parts that interested me.

This also is not to say I didn’t miss out on a lot of really good informative television by walking away—and hence one of the reasons why I decided to step back in to the digital race and get myself re-rooted in an optional course of life.

I hadn’t seen really good high definition television in forever, save going to a friend’s house where the tv was on, or sitting in the entertainment lounge at my local tv dealership watching the small hairs on the back necks of the football players sway as the brutes ran the field for a touchdown. It was time to check in.

I can only imagine what I must have looked like to a seasoned “televisionee” as I watched—bug-eyed—my first hour-long current television series in more than four years, dipped every few minutes in the most amazing commercials for shampoo, cars, “Viagra,” ocean cruise lines “to where!!”, the newest mobile technologies, and of course “GEICO,” ads in which the lizard hasn’t aged at all since I last him in 2012 (it must be that miracle facelift!!)

So far I’ve been “Bachelorized,” “Pawn Starred,” and watched zombies walk the earth, dragging that one foot—which I gather is a popular pastime for couch potatoes? Good heavens.

But perhaps the best of all the shows I have wandered in and out of over the past three weeks was the “Golden Globe Awards,” broadcast live on Sunday night from “good ol’ Hollywood,” which hasn’t changed a bit. 

It’s still glitzy, glamorous, and full of opinions—the most memorable of which being that of Meryl Streep, who in her “understated” yet dignified speech reminded us out here in “La La Land” that we’re in for a rather unwelcome change.