The Thing About Television

The thing about television is that nobody after a certain age should actually want to watch it. I mean, it’s all written to be as non-taxing to the 14 year old mind as it can be. Should any grown person ever give a damn about the new fall season? Now maybe, just because there are natural lulls and voids in yours and my life, having 2 or 3 shows to watch on a regular weekly basis is all right, but how many cop shows, lawyer shows, medical shows, wacky attractive white folks comedy shows, pseudo talent/reality/documentary shows, fat-people-are-people-too shows, watch-paint-dry-as-I-rent-my-house shows, and idiotic news does the human brain need? And they’re all the same bloody show!

“Tooth & Mouth: When it comes to crime, a crack team of dental technicians find that truth…is often in the eye of the molar. Presented with limited commercial interruption by Colgate Chewing Floss; tonight on Fox.”

Here’s how TV knows it’s got you ungently by the balls and you don’t even care: CSI; CSI: Miami, CSI: New York; CSI: L.A. (probably coming); NCIS; NCIS: L.A. (really); Law & Order; Law & Order: SVU; Law & Order Frickin’ Jesus—- Sweet greasy damn, they’re not even pretending to hide it anymore! It’s all Mountain Dew, folks, just a different colored dye! (By the way, Mountain Dew is now MTN Dew; even our beverages are illiterate.)

But we watch anyway. We could, let’s say, play cards, or study a new language, or learn an instrument; we might take up painting, mold clay, scrapbook, reminisce. Cooking can be a joy to perform when approached as a possibility rather than an obligation. Conversation-—remember that?-—conversation is a beautiful thing once the mind is engaged. Instead, we watch TV. We get home from work, we’ve got 5 or 6 hours to kill before bed, we devote at least 3 of those to TV. On average. I’m not saying TV doesn’t have its place. Like terrible romance novels and Tom Cruise movies, the brain needs its candy. But even candy has its levels of benefits. Candy doesn’t have to decay the brain and sludge the cognitive processes.

TV, like bad books, often intentionally kills our ability to think. Parasitic self-preservation.

TV does not care about your marriage, your kids, the goals you coulda, woulda, shoulda reached, or whether anybody in your family ever amounts to anything. If corporations have the same rights as individuals (get this, they do. Yeah, I know) then TV is the Pope. TV tells you when to wake up, when to take a leak, when to pay attention to your spouse, when to eat, when to go out, when to stay in, when to finally get things done…because, for a lot of us, our time is scheduled around something stupid on TV. I remember when TV was at least a gracious guest. Sometimes it tried to be art. Rod Serling was a god.

Do we all know that advertisers have made television the ubiquitous necessary evil? Societally, it’s a necessary evil because there are some nights a man needs his Cinemax after those long spells of not getting any, but other than that, along with a couple cooking shows, one comedy, and a righteous documentary on PBS about Blues players or other bit of coolness, what does TV actually offer to justify stealing life away from us middle-aged fucks who are already closer to death than we realize?

Addiction: When someone’s addicted what’s the first thing out of their mouth after some truth is put in front of their faces? “I don’t have to (fill in addiction blank); I just do it when I feel like it; I can stop anytime I want.”

Shut the pie hole. You do have to; you do it all the time; you’ll stop when you’ve been abandoned by everybody who cared about you. Maybe. Or you’ll spiral into the addiction so hard you’ll be scheduling your life according to the convenient blocks in TV Guide.

And that, my friends, would be a crying shame.

How To Be A Tween-Aged Girl?

Dear Diary: Ok, so, like, this entry is completely and totally about WTF, right? So, like, there’s this singer, right, named Chris Brown who totally apes Michael Jackson if MJ didn’t have any talent, and he is, like, so full of himself, and I’m like, Why, really, but he was with this other girl singer (who sang about umbrellas! Hello, mini wtf) who he decided to punch around a bit, then he was like, “No I didn’t,” then he was like, “Screw everybody,” then he was like, “I’m SO sorry,” then he was like, “Buy my new album,” so, like, at the Grammys (why name an award after grandmothers, really!) somebody thought it’d be a good idea to have him perform and have her perform, but not together ‘cause lesbians would be all “Oh hell no,” but still though that’s kind of nasty, especially after Whitney Houston died and she’d been with that complete fuck of a husband, and you’d think the Grammy bosses would have been able to connect the eww dots and back off or something, right, but no, so they do it and Chris Brown is all “Yeah, look at me, look at me” and Rihanna is all hump-the-floor since she can’t sing for shit, so she’s all “Humping the floor I am empowered,” and then a bunch of girls start tweeting that Chris Brown could beat them up anytime, but it’s, like, a double intender ‘cause “beat it up” means have sex too, like, you know, “I’ma hit that,” except stupider and from guys pretending they know how to do it, and the girls are all ha ha, we don’t care, sarcasm and shit, but it’s not, so the media goes all, “But what about the children?” and girls are still like woot woot and guys who don’t know how to do it are like, hell yeah Chris Brown, you are our god, but I’d probably get put in jail or have to go on Dr. Phil if I ever kneed a guy in the balls for saying he was going to beat me with his double intender, right, as if that’s fair, right, so, like, WTF?

But finally I just turned off the TV and read. I did NOT know that Bella got pregnant since the movies are such ass and I refuse to see them. I mean, he’s a vampire; shouldn’t his thing be full of dust? But Bella’s all like “I love you, but I love you” and E & J are like, “Shit, make a damn decision” and she’s all “I don’t need either of you. Yes I do,” and part of me was saying, “Screw this, write in the diary”... so I thought long and hard about, like, what I’m expected as a woman to think and feel, right, like in 5 years when I’m in a deep relationship letting a man know his boundaries and making sure he’s not a prick, and all these Oprah level emotions just jumped me and I’m all WTF, this is weird, so I figured if I wrote it down it’d make sense somehow. But it doesn’t.

Plus Chris Brown is stiff when he dances. I mean, what a douche. No way in hell my deep relationship man is gonna be a douche. I mean, I’ve got SOME standards. So thanks for being my diary. Good night.

What Keeps Me Going

Gave another kid a homemade sketch pad yesterday. He's always getting in trouble and I hardly ever see him smile. I asked him what he liked to draw and he said cars, so I made him a pad with examples of cars, motorcycles, space shuttles, starships, superheroes, and ninjas, because what 9 year old boy doesn't like those? His little face lit up. He's got a beautiful smile, exactly as a kid should. That's another two seconds out of hell for me, but reprieve in the afterlife isn't motivation.

I'm here for the here and now.

By Force Of Will Alone

By force of will alone I keep the world from ending until I have seen Who Fears Death, The Hobbit, The Avengers, and The Herculoids (Herculoids not in production but one day for sure, and please god, not in some hipster ironic way) at a movie theater. By force of will alone I keep the world from ending until I've lived to see Earth experience First Contact of the 3rd Kind: a ship landing in Central Park crewed by aliens who are not metaphors for our own stupidities. By force of will alone I keep the world from ending until I am surprised in the mail with autographed photos of Rosario Dawson and Pam Grier, separate photos or together on one, although both on one would result in an extended comatose orgasmic state for me, which I would hope medical science wouldn't rush to cure. Following that, apocalypse y'all. Break out the Mad Max soundtrack and stay away from my property. By force of will alone I keep the world from ending until my novel The Brothers Jetstream: Afropuffs Are the Antennae of the Universe is completed, published to great acclaim, turned into a movie starring Taye Diggs and Idris Elba with a script co-written by Harlan Ellison and Steven Barnes. By force of will alone I keep the world from ending until I see the first woman I ever fell in love with again, just to say hi. By force of will alone I keep the world from ending until they start genetically modifying people to be able to breath underwater. A pair of Speedos are kept handy for just such an eventuality. And a trident. And my declaration of war against the surface dwellers. By force of will alone I keep the world from ending until Jesus comes back and reveals he was gay two thousand years ago and he's just as fabulous now. The environmental clean up costs would be staggering what with all the tiny heads exploding, but it'd be totally worth it. Plus the ascendancy lanes would be a lot less congested. By force of will alone I keep the world from ending until a certain someone has had a full and happy life with her bird and her knight. She knows who she is. By force of will alone I keep the world from ending until a corps of Victoria's Secret models are sent to deeply Muslim lands to foment gender revolution. "You can take away my lift-and-separate... but you can't take away... my freedom!" By force of will alone I keep the world from ending until the people of Wal-Mart are a pestilence no more.

Or until the peach cobbler finishes baking in my oven.

Imperius Rex.

Telly's On In the Dentist's Office

Random thoughts as the television drills the brains out of me.

Lifetime Network. Seems to me, on the womanly front as I wait about as the Wife gets her teefes drilled, it's akin to me--strapping Mandingo Buck that I am--watching a "Watch Kunta Get Beat" Network every day. Guess somebody's gotta watch those heavily-edited sex scenes featuring bad eighties electric guitar in the background. I've been subjected to it a few minutes. Check off: woman in danger; woman killed; woman in threatening situation; badly edited and highly cliched sex/guitar scene; smoldering heroic type of manly dude; blonde with the good hair that you know will survive anything; blonde whose hair isn't as suitably coiffed -- set to die. Ladies, your name is not Vicky Victim. Stop watching massa coil that lash.

The previous time waiting for the Wife in a waiting room they, they made me watch Wendy Williams. I still hurt inside.

Why can't waiting rooms have individual isolation chambers? I'd much rather achieve an altered state of reality where I revert to prehistoric man and eat deer at the zoo than watch Wendy Williams.

I'd rather shave my nads, spackle them entirely with peanut butter, and fall asleep on a park bench than watch Wendy Williams.

You'd think there'd be a lot of male frontal nudity (even blurry dicks count) on the Lifetime Network, but there's not. Lots of tight blouses and female cleavage though. Curious.

I'll bet Wendy Williams starred in a Lifetime Network movie. That explains the current state of the world.

This is Wendy Williams, likely a good mother and decent human being, but god!



Now you hurt too.

I'm so sorry.

At least the rare token blacks on the Lifetime Network movies are too incidental to die. The dream is alive, Dr. King!

Why A Man Should Never Plausibly Imagine Himself As The Hot Chick In A Porno Shower Scene: The Weight Loss Blog, Supplemental

So I'm soaping up in the shower and start to slide into that scene in every soft porn movie where the fabulously endowed woman finds the combination of gel, breasts, and a handheld nozzle powerfully hornanistic -- but it's just me in the real shower. Me. By myself. With chest hair and everything. Atop firm, supple breasts.

Look away, lads. Look the hell away.

Methinks more vegetables and less desserts are in order.

In Which The Colloquialism For That Most Intimate Of Acts Is Used Quite A Lot

In Which The Colloquialism For That Most Intimate Of Acts Is Used Quite A Lot, To the Point That Even The Staunchest Colloquialers Out There May Take Small Offense And Wonder Whether I Seek To Offend Or Shame, For In Realizing That Sometimes The Shortest Sentence Is The Most Complex Conveyance, Your Humble Servant Has Elected To Quite Simply Say:

Fuck FOX. Fuck CNN. Fuck MSNBC. Unfuck PBS. Fuck malls. Fuck TV. Fuck “War On”. Fuck brutes. Fuck White Houses. Fuck corporate lobbyists. Fuck excess. Fuck celebrity. Fuck US magazine. Fuck People magazine. Fuck fuckity fuck TMZ. Fuck guns. Fuck pricks. Fuck Glade Scents. Fuck monoliths calling themselves “Family Companies.” Fuck Disney’s Fuck-Up-A-Kid Factory. Fuck idiots. Fuck dissemblers. Fuck Appleby’s. Unfuck intelligence. Fuck Pepsi. Fuck Coke. Fuck obesity. Fuck malnutrition. Fuck sponsor massas. Fuck recognition whores. Fuck social media. Unfuck outside. Fuck theft. Fuck religion without contemplation. Fuck collusion. Fuck Popes. Fuck Dons. Fuck moguls. Fuck oppression. Fuck depression. Fuck repression. Unfuck cognition. Fuck cable TV. Fuck NBC. Fuck “As Seen On TV” ‘cause it’s all utter shit.

Take a deep breath now and fuck texting, tweeting and poorly performed fellatio. Fuck the fact that the reason you can’t live in peace is somebody else’s version of peace involves their boot in your face. Fuck Abilify and Lunestra and words that fuck you up. Fuck the profit motive, fuck it till the cows come home.

Wait a minute.

Fuck the inability to be quiet. Fuck Wall Street. Fuck it once more. Fuck the dying of the light. Fuck Top 40 whores.

And lastly fuck those who withhold just enough to force us to beg for more.