For about twenty-seven and a half years now we have been watching TV on the smallest television set ever made. We bought the set at a View-O-Rama Outlet Mall, where we also picked up a year’s supply of baking soda, and some blue jeans that look like they were once worn by a sumo wrestler. Of all those bargain purchases, the baking soda turned out to be the wisest choice, but the jeans, not so much. They were soon relegated to yard work, then to cutoffs, then to an organization called Memes for Jeans.
The TV set stayed though and fit nicely into a cubby for our viewing pleasure. That went along well until we began the Grand Slam tennis events each season, particularly Wimbledon and the US Open. We squanted, a more painful version of the verb squint, at the tiny yellow dot, presumably a tennis ball, that moved back and forth across our set, and we vowed each tennis season to upgrade our television.
By the time those tournaments were over this year, we both had such bad cases of dry eye from squanting that our eye sockets were registered with the National Weather Service as one of the seven driest places in the continental United States. The other six locations were terrains that are often associated with Gila monsters, sand and sun-bleached animal skulls. By the way, I have tried to dowse my eyes with water to get some relief from my dry eye syndrome, but that involves me having a relationship with a sink, and as you know from a previous Knee Deep episode, sinks and I don’t get along very well.
So, my wife and I took the plunge, so to speak, and bought a bigger television set, a process that involved building a bigger cabinet to put it in, and any number of other complicated decorating decisions, some of which required marital counseling and a new education about flat screens, cable connections, ethernets, and serial numbers longer than your hand. Every day for the last two months, from the time I got up until I went to bed, I was faced with dumping some old school knowledge about TV’s and wrap my dehydrated eyes and brain around a purchase that involved a new set of technical advancements, satellite signal capabilities, and someone at the cable company who likes to repeat the phrase, “your call is very important to us.”
I can say without equivocation, that changing our TV set has been one of toughest things I have ever gone through.
I don’t like anything about the upgrading process, but to start with, I especially don’t like the term “flat screen.” At all. I wanted to get that right out in the open before we go any further. I do like the word television, and its nickname, “TV”. A lot. They are simple, easy and remind me of my first pleasant experiences watching programs as a kid when life seemed less violent, and I needed considerably less moisturizer.
I can understand the term “flat screens” being used to describe a thin crust pizza, or a football play where the quarterback laterals off to the side at the last second, or the place on our door my grandson put his hand through last summer, but not for an apparatus as important as the television. It is a creation that needs no further introduction, like mustard on a hotdog and does not need a new name either. I don’t need surround sound, places to hold my cup, and I don’t need salsa, guac, or a mesquite-flavored relish on my hot dog either. A TV, by any other name, despite what Shakespeare said, does not smell as sweet and when we go messing with the name or any part of it, we give up all that unsophisticated programming that filtered down to us every decade since the 1950’s and with it, the risk of re-inventing something that, like yo-yo’s, cotton socks, and the copper penny, is already dang-near perfect.
Unfortunately, flat screens are here to stay and in purchasing one, my wife and I felt a kind of electronic pressure pass through us, where thousands of unseen wavelengths were suddenly ricocheting off our skeleton system like caffeinated ping pong balls. No longer did we have that warm and fuzzy feeling like in days of old when our television set was our wonderland and the most important object in the room. We are isolated from that relationship now, blocked off and feeling alone. Before, when we watched TV, we used to rise from the sofa to get a snack, perhaps walk around inside our TV for a minute or two, then come back out when we felt like it, miraculously, and go back to the sofa. Now, that experience has flat-lined into a black hole, a cold and distant blot on the existential horizon between fast forward and rewind.
We often sit and stare into that void, out towards Somewhere and have had to get use to pausing this new flat screen temporarily to discuss whether we should be using our binocular or panoramic vision. We don’t know whether to focus on the general picture in front of us or a specific area, the big picture or the details. These new screens, we have realized, are more like watching a surface covered with programmable wallpaper – a lot more area than is visually possible to take in. Committing to watching one side or the other in the future is probably going to mean rewinding the show at some point to watch what we missed on the other side of the screen way over on the other side of the room.
“Honey,” I said in my new flat tone, “Tonight, why don’t you take the right side and I’lI take the left.”
“Ok,” she says, “and tomorrow we’ll can go back and watch the middle.”
“Yes, like we used to,” I add trying to keep the peace.
“And I can watch the trailer again in case we missed something somewhere,” she says with her head lowered.
“Somewhere,” I whisper back.
I realized we had just stepped into another new realm, the “home theatre,” as if we were now going to a movie place where, traditionally, we were greeted by a life-size cardboard cutout of superheroes like Batman and copious boxes of Raisinets. I call that home confusion, not home theatre and I am still trying to figure out whether our flat screen is a piece of art on the wall or a piece of furniture. I fear a future where my wife and I will start using it as a mirror when we walk by, say, to check our hair or teeth so we don’t have to run all the way back to the bathroom.
The main difficulty we had committing to this new black programmable wallpaper was when we realized it meant letting go of one of the last vestiges of our beloved cat Chloe, whose play toys were still stapled to the underside of our sofa table, which we still call a sofa table. When Chloe watched TV with us back in the day, she would eventually enter into such deep REM sleep that her eyelids would twitch as if she was watching her own fantasy movie in Kittyland. It was an endearing sight to behold, the quintessential peace that surpassed all cat understanding. There was only one thing on this fair earth that could bring her out of such a bottomless escape, and that was the epic beginning of a movie, where Columbia’s Greek goddess, high upon her pedestal, sent her glorious multi-beamed lights cascading across our viewing area.
When Chloe heard the majestic opening notes to that Columbia movie introduction, it was as if she was smelling catnip for the very first time. Her eyes opened wide and she sat straight up erect as telephone pole, and without taking time to stretch or lick herself, which is unusual for a cat, she tracked those light beams from the lady’s upheld torch from one end of the room to the other. It was Chloe’s literal nod to the radiating energy coming from the TV, sunlight pouring out onto her feline world. Fifteen seconds later, it was all over, and she would lay back down, and disappear once more into a fuzzy ball.
In this season of our flat screen change, we can finally let go of our little six pounds of family furriness. With the blessing of our upgrade to technology, I’m thankful our little kitty Chloe passed away before we got our new piece of furniture slash mirror-art slash flat screen, or whatever it is. I’m glad our cat was spared of the adjustment. I can’t image her now, waking up out of a dead sleep to behold the flowing gown of that symbolic Columbia Lady with the brilliant torch, expecting to be bathed in total brilliance, only to be confused by a beam of light that now flattens out in space, somewhere between her left, right and middle.