Well over a month ago, we inadvertently became a semi no-TV household. Our satellite provider mailed us a replacement ‘smart card’ for our satellite box, a five-year-old WebTV-integrated PVR which we have never used as a PVR or as a WebTV device but only as a receiver. The smart card managed to disable the device, and so the only reception we have was broadcast. Living in the center of a large city, you’d think that would mean fifteen or twenty channels but realitistically it limits reception to PBS and the local NBC and ABC affiliates. Happily for Viv, that has meant she has been able to keep up with the hypnotic ‘Lost,’ and happily for me, that means I have been able to catch a ‘Nova’ and a ‘Frontline’ here and there.

More happily for me, that has meant that the constant background noise of the TV has been replaced by the constant background noise of WCPE, and I have strongly felt my mood lift. I am frequently occupied with murderous, hateful mutterings when the TV is on constantly, an internal dialogue filled with fantasies of destruction directed at the media icons and humiliatingly-portrayed buffoons who flicker on and off stage in venues such as ‘Oprah,’ and ’20/20.’ I have been largely unaware of this dialogue until this month, when it’s vanishment occasioned reflection on the cause of my uncharacteristically charitable, forgiving, and pleasant mood.

I view with some trepidation the family negotiation that this calls for; Viv’s mood and sense of self have been ever-nurtured by the tube and I am nearly certain that she has felt as deadened and oppressed by the absence of the brainsucking spawn of hell as I have lightened and released. Where I feel as though a stinging, biting swarm of gnats, whose bites produce nightmares of hatred an torture has suddenly ceased to afflict my existence, based on past conversations, I suspect she has felt a sense of suffocating isolation, the solitude of the grave.

I would have to say this is something of a pickle.