THE TELEVISION BLUES

I’m having TV withdrawal. TV news withdrawal more than anything else. My pandemic isolation has caused me to go cold turkey, as if I’d been forcibly placed in tele-addiction rehab.

We have DirecTV. It’s satellite television. It’s all we can get out here where we live. I have to say, it pretty much sucks. We have fifty blue million movie channels, all of which seem to have been showing the same dozen movies for the past decade—which they also appear to share with each other (like, “It’s Wednesday, okay, you take Fast and Furious 8 and 9 and I’ll take Fifty First Dates and The Wedding Singer, while to me it all seems like Groundhog Day...forever).

News channels are a paltry selection of local national channels, a couple of Chilean news stations, CNN en Español, the CNN International signal in English and the BBC. We used to have Fox News as well, which gave me something to vent and cuss at when I wasn’t watching CNN or “the Beeb”. But they eventually took it off the schedule, because who in Latin America could possibly give a flying crap about the ultra-American super-nationalist drivel that spews from that signal twenty-four/seven? For jingoistic lies and propaganda, it was far more interesting for South American audiences to tune to the Venezuelan state channel and listen to a load of BS about how good venezolanos were having it under the Bolivarian regime of Nicolás Maduro. What I wouldn’t give for the addition of CBS, ABC and MSNBC!

I know I can watch the news, and, more often, read the news on the Internet. And I do. But I have to admit that I’m a child (I’m talking inner child here) of the TV era. The first generation to have television, that phenomenon of the late forties and early fifties that couldn’t have seemed more like magic that brought the world into our homes. So breakfast or supper without my daily news fix is traumatic, despite having the world at my fingertips via the digital phenomenon of the current age.  

DirecTV comes with a few dozen sports channels that are the big draw for most guys, but which I can’t recall ever having paused on for more than five minutes unless it was for a boxing match—I really hate how the art of boxing is being pushed into a backseat by cage-fighting, which I find appalling. There are a similar number of children’s channels—which are pretty much extraneous noise to two childless and grandchildless senior citizens— housewife mediums (or is it media?), and a slew of reality shows involving hillbilly Gypsies, backwater crocodile tamers, enormously obese brides, treasure hunters, gold-diggers, pawn brokers, little people, tattoo artists, and XL couples who are alone, naked and afraid (and censored which kind of defeats the purpose) out in the wild—I mean if you don’t count the camera crew, guides, handlers and the helicopters flying constantly overhead. It’s all kind of a grotesque sideshow.

Very occasionally there will be a good old movie—not “old” like 1990 or 2000, which I refer to as “yesterday”, but old-old, black and white old—or a classic Western. Although for some reason, despite the thousands of motion pictures cranked out in the golden age of Hollywood, DirecTV can’t seem to find more than five or six (always the same five or six) to show. I mean, The Tin Star and Last Train from Gun Hill might be venerable classics of the Western genre (although I’d take the original Magnificent Seven—Yul and Steve, not Denzel and Cris—over them any day), but it starts getting hard to stay awake for them when you’ve seen them thirty times or so...in a month.

And then there’s that other problem with satellite TV: If it rains hard, you can’t see it—sometimes it rains hard for twenty days straight in Patagonia. If it snows, you can’t see it. If there are solar storms, you can’t see it. If the dish can’t be pointed in the direction of the nearest repeater antenna, you can’t see it. If you don’t have a direct line of sight to the sky from the dish, you can’t see it. If a weed grows an inch too high in front of the dish, you can’t see it. If somebody happens to spit out the window on an otherwise clear summer day and the spittle lands on the dish, you can’t see it.

Well, this is problematic in a place like ours where, despite being perched on a promontory, the house is surrounded by dense forest and tall crags. But when we first got DirecTV installed, we lucked out, because the direction of the repeater was northwest of our deck and the deck looked out over a lagoon that connected with a major lake, at the northwest end of which was the hill on which the satellite repeater antenna was erected. So it was all open sky between here and there. The deck is high and back then, the vegetation around it was low—a few beech saplings, a couple of tiny wild apple trees that we’d transplanted, a few waist-high Douglas firs that the birds had seeded with pine nuts from a nearby property that had exotic pine groves planted back in the nineteen-forties, a few scrub bushes. Nothing tall enough to interfere with our view all the way down to the lagoon, or with the open line of sight between the dish and the repeater several miles away.

But since then, the saplings have grown into formidable, towering hardwoods, the apple trees have flourished, and the little pines have spread like an evergreen tidal wave over the lower part of our lot to form a dark, brushy, deep green thicket, rising toward the sky and blocking any view of the wetland below except from the second storey of our cabin. 

At first the dish was bolted directly to the deck and reception was perfect. My wife and I had neither one ever had anything like cable or satellite TV and we were fascinated by the variety of available channels. More fascinating still were the music channels included in the nine-hundreds. Flip through the channels for a cavalcade of genres and styles: pop, rock ‘n’ roll, blues, soul, reggae, tropical, salsa, standards, big band swing, jazz, modern jazz, jazz vocals, easy listening, new age, classical, opera, hard rock, show tunes, ballads, Music of the Seventies/Eighties/Nineties, etc., etc. So we hooked up the sound through our stereo for better quality. It took us a while to realize that in this case too, it was always the same line-up, so that you could set your watch by Beethoven’s Ninth or by the Boogie-woogie Bugle Boy from Company B.

But then the trees in front of the deck started growing. After a few years, the beech saplings were even in height with the handrail. The apple trees started bearing fruit and shot up higher every year. A native broom grew high and strong on the edge of the property next door—which I would eventually acquire—and gracefully hung its big head full of lavender-blue blossoms over the fence. The process was gradual, of course, and we failed to connect the dots with our also gradually failing signal. When the interruptions to our viewing became ever more frequent, I called the DirecTV technical department and they sent a guy out to have a look.

“You’ve got way too much foliage out there under the deck. No way a clear signal can get through all that. You’re going to have to cut some of that.”

“Oooor...” I said, “alternatively, we could find another place to put the dish.”

He looked at me as if he had a choice suggestion for where I could put it. But then he shrugged, went out to his truck and came back with a toolbox and extension ladder. After looking around, considering angles, checking this and checking that, he said, “How about high up here on the end of the house?” I gave him a thumbs up, and suddenly, we had a nice clear signal again.

As a parting shot, however, he couldn’t help returning to his original solution. “I’m warning you, though,” he said, “it won’t be long before you don’t have a signal again, if you don’t do something about that.” He jerked his head disdainfully in the direction of the stunningly verdant forest beyond the deck, as if he were referring to something shameful.

“You mean like cutting it all down so I can see the same ten movies for the next ten years?”

He pursed his lips, looked down his nose at me and said, “I mean, if you want to keep having TV, this is going to have to be thinned out.”

“Yes, well, I doubt that’s going to happen, so, who knows? Maybe when the time comes, we’ll find another solution.”

All was right with the world again. I had New Day and/or BBC World News with breakfast in the morning, Anderson Cooper 360 with supper and, if I was lucky, there was a movie I hadn’t seen more than a dozen times to doze through before going up to my bed and reading a while until I went to sleep. On luckier nights still, I might even get a documentary about the Civil Rights Era or about some interesting historical personality or event. Those were too precious for them to run again—once or twice, and you’d missed your chance to see it, buddy. But you could see White Chicks at just about any hour of the day or night—for ever and ever, amen.

Anyway, in this ages-long Year of the Plague, the DirecTV technician’s proclamation of bad augury has come to pass. Just as it has been a year in which COVID in all of its variants has thrived, so too has the forest, and it has taken full advantage of a long rainy season and a warm, sunny dry season to grow with unusual impetus.

Long story short, our DirecTV signal has grown weaker and weaker as the foliage has grown higher and higher. Which, if it weren’t for the pandemic, wouldn’t have been a problem. I would merely have called another reluctant technician out to move the dish higher still—onto the gable of the roof if necessary—in order to capture a clear piece of sky.

But in the Year of the Plague there are more important things to worry about than whether I can see my TV or not. After making very real sacrifices in order to mitigate the risk of catching the virus and, perhaps, dying—my wife refraining from traveling to Buenos Aires to see her aging, unwell sister or her younger brother and nephews in more than a year, and I not having been able to travel either to the US to see friends and family there, or to Buenos Aires to visit with colleagues and friends since the end of 2018—having someone completely unknown to us come to the house after, perhaps, going maskless, partying and howling at the moon nightly, to say nothing of visiting multiple homes daily, merely to fix our TV, has seemed to us a ridiculous risk to take.

So eventually it got so we would lose the signal and to get it back I’d have to reboot the decoder and then painstakingly click through every channel until one could catch the ghost of a signal filtering through the tree branches. And then, even more cautiously, go up or down gradually until I got to the channel I wanted. It was an exhausting process. And, in the end, it got to the place where changing channels was just too risky, so I left it on the news channel twenty-four/seven and simply turned off the image and sound when we weren’t watching it. 

Then one day last week, the screen went black, then flashed like lightning, and died. I realized this wasn’t a question of satellite signal. The flat screen, which wasn’t more than six years old, was kaput and refused to be revived. In the troubleshooting manual, it said, “Try not to leave your screen tuned constantly to the same channel, since this can damage the device.” Shit! Who knew?

I thought, “Well good. Maybe this is a good chance to break myself of the TV habit. But how do you kick a habit that started when you were three and is now going on six and a half decades?” My wife likes a little TV in the evening but finds my morning appointment with the news and my running, often profane, commentary a major intrusion in the quiet of the early morning hours. And since she is also an absolutely voracious reader, she couldn’t really care less whether the TV works or not. If I think about it, I don’t need it at all. I do all of my research online. TV is just a little mind candy I suck on between work and sleep. But just you take that candy away from a Baby Boomer! The withdrawal is instantaneous.

All of which got me to thinking about where my TV habit began. In the Jurassic Age of Television, when forty-four million Americans made sure that they were home at the prime time hour for I Love Lucy, or when similar millions tuned in to CBS to hear Walter Cronkite read the news. No twenty-four-hour news cycle. No video recorders. Just the appointed hour when you were there in front of the set to hear Cronkite, or you didn’t have the slightest idea what was happening. He was the trusted name in news, and he “anchored” millions to their sets...forever. But that’s a story for another day...

Well, a few days into withdrawal, my wife brought home a new forty-inch Hitachi flat screen that she bought at the supermarket when she went to do the grocery shopping. We’re “on the list” to get vaccinated, but so far...chirp, chirp, crickets. First thing I’ll do though, once I get a couple of shots of Sputnik 5 in my arm, I’ll get the DirecTV guy out here and get my breakfast date with the news back. In the meantime, we’ve got the eleven seasons of Cheers, the five seasons of Taxi and the nine seasons of The King of Queens on DVD. Hopefully that’ll be enough methadone to get me through until some real TV comes along.