ShareThisI have a confession to make, so brace yourself. It isn't pretty.
I don't have cable.
There, I said it. It's finally out there. Now, please, let me explain.
I do have cable, but it's not really cable. You tell people you have cable anymore and they assume it's 100 channels in high definition, with Digital Video Recording and a dish on the roof.
I have a cable. No box, no dish, no flat-screen display, just one cable and each of the 20 basic channels it supplies.
Even the suggestion that I have 20 channels is a stretch. Most of my channels are either public access or public television. When the local high school basketball teams aren't playing and PBS is hosting a fund drive, my options decline by half.
I am one of the few remaining people who watch network television for more than the local weather. I also watch a great deal of the Realty channel (as in homes for sale, not aging rock stars), and have come to learn every colorful term in the Realtor's handbook.
But the true confession here is not that I lack the full-on HD hundred-channel experience common to every condo, split-level, McMansion and humble trailer in America. It's that I actually prefer it this way.
A life without complete cable is practically an ascetic life, comfortably bare bones, like Thoreau's cabin in the woods, only with air conditioning and "Jeopardy." Without constant entertainment, I actually have to think of things to do. Projects that would otherwise languish for weeks I complete on time. I even read.
Or at least that's what I'd been telling myself until just this week, when a cable box found its way into my cabin. Along with a new installation I received a three-month trial of the pricey package for the cost of economy cable.
Suddenly, with a home awash in channels I could only read about online, I felt my convictions begin to waver. For the first time in years I was able to watch my town's baseball team, forsaken by the local networks for inane prime-time schlock. This and content on 100 other channels could even be recorded for future loafing.
I was actually swimming in the mainstream culture of my friends and coworkers. It was as if I'd returned from the woods, wild-eyed and bearded, to witness the music video for some song people have been humming for months.
And, like any bearded hermit returning to civilization, it didn't take me long to yearn for my seclusion. With a great deal to watch came a great deal I had no intention of watching. Recorded shows stacked one on top of another, maxing out the space on my DVR. I began to miss the Realty channel.
When the three-month trial period ended, I found I had not been lured to the other side. I retreated to the embrace of basic cable. And I started reading a new book.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)
