Day Eight: Sober Since 2005

A few years ago, after moving to Georgia and living alone a few months, I became addicted to television. Up until that point, I had always been fairly balanced in my TV viewing habits, carefully picking and choosing TV fare. And there was a lot of great TV in the 90s—The X-files, Seinfeld, American Gothic, Buffy.

I used to plan my clubbing around Twin Peaks. Sure I could have taped it, but no one went out before 10 PM and chances were I’d overhear someone at the club talking about the plot revelations of that night’s episodes. No, I had to see the episodes fresh. Besotted by Kyle McLaughlin, I’d sit in the floor with friends, pulling on fishnets, applying eye liner & white powder, sucking in each episode. Once that night's episode was over, only then could I go out. At the club I was then free to dish with the drag queens and art boys about “what a genius David Lynch is.”

What I really think is Good Television is not, well television. Sure it may appear weekly, like Twin Peaks, but Good Television is when each episode feels like a movie, not TV. Good Television defies the gruel on the other channels that is marketed for, as my mother would say in her lovely Southern lilt, The Masses.

But in 2003 when I moved to Georgia and lived alone for the first time in ten years, I got sucked into television. I would lie on the couch all weekend and soon every weeknight, becoming increasingly anesthetized at whatever came on VH1, HBO, or TBS. I almost missed a Christmas party after a day-long investment in an America’s Next Top Model marathon.

After a VH1 Behind the Music on Vanilla Ice, I called up my More Than Sister and recounted in what was probably a tedious amount of detail the faux rapper’s rise n’ fall n’ redemption. It was at that moment I began to wonder if I had a "problem."

“Can a person become addicted to television?” I asked her.

She paused. I could hear her over the phone thoughtfully inhaling her cigarette. “Well there have been studies that after hours of television viewing over a long period of time, the visual stimuli and editing techniques does something to the brains of lab rats and children, so yeah, I think it’s possible.”

A month later my cable company called to tell me they were upgrading my service.

Did I have a choice?

No.

So I acquiesced, knowing that my basic cable had only been the gateway drug for the crack heaven that they would happily deliver straight to my house and into my frontal lobe.

Luckily, living in a rural area became a blessing.

The company wasn’t local, and I had so many problems coordinating the installment time. Then there was the sizably increased bill, and my concern that this was more TV than what I had ordered. Over the course of many phone calls I made trying to sort my service out, I became increasingly pissed off. Eventually I called to cancel the service.

“You want to do what?” the service woman asked me over the phone.

“I want to cancel.”

“But that means you won’t have any television service! This package is your only option.”

“Oh yeah?”

At the time I thought I would just eventually get satellite or something when I had time to investigate my options. But I was busy. And the options were complicated and after a brief uncomfortable period of withdrawal, I gradually began not to mind the silence in my home, the books I read, and the really great movies I watched instead.

And if I want to watch Good Televison there are always episodes on DVD—whole seasons can be mine to binge on or I can parse them out over six months or a year—commercial free!

I have been TV-free since spring 2005. Only recently have I started to wonder, could the One-Eyed beast be allowed back into my home? After all there is BBC America, The History Channel, Turner Classics, and the ever-soothing Muzak-drenched Weather Channel.

But then can I be trusted? Can addicts ever be allowed to indulge, just a little?