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If hell were a publicly owned company, it would be a television network.

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-- Just for shits and giggles (two things I do not often do concurrently), I just turned on my television set, and that was said by a newscaster within two minutes. It's simply too easy to remind myself of why I can't stand television.

Barring such contingencies as extended periods of unemployment, I have not regularly watched television since about 1996. I haven't watched more than an hour of television in the span of a month's time since probably April 2002, and prior to that the average was maybe two to four hours a month. And as I sit here thinking about it right now, I have not watched a single television program since maybe February or March, and even then it was only to watch David Letterman, who I have long considered to be the only acceptable reason to turn it on.

I have kind of an odd history with television. Being born into a fundamentalist Baptist church, I was brought up as a small child to believe that television was full of satanic debauchery and it was just plain too evil for me to view. I can actually remember watching Saturday morning cartoons as a small child, but we did get to a point where I never watched television at all. I can remember a two-year span in which the TV was pulled out of the closet only twice, and one of them was to watch the Reagan-Mondale debates in 1984. I was eight years old.

Things changed when my mother moved my brother and me from Olympia to Spokane in 1985. She let us listen to rock music (gasp!), and before long we had a decent sized, color TV in our living room. After being deprived of virtually any form of entertainment outside of singing hymns at church, Mom let the pendulum swing way too far to the other side, and she let my brother and me watch virtually any television program or movie she watched, regardless of the rating. I was nine years old the first time I saw Revenge of the Nerds and Porky's -- my niece who visited last week is 11 and I can't fathom a kid that young watching such movies.

My longstanding resentment toward television is admittedly historically tied to my mother. If my mom was not paying any attention to us, or if she was not directly involved in any part of our lives where it would actually be appropriate (such as, say, a choir concert), it was usually because she preferred the company of the TV. That box with the rapid fire electrons became the cornerstone of her existence, and continued as such until Mom discovered the Internet.

For many years in the beginning, I was all for it. I watched my favorite weekly shows with the kind of dedication that could rival anyone's -- Gimme a Break, Night Court, Cheers, even ER and Seinfeld in their early days, and my all-time favorite, Picket Fences. It was a few years before it began to genuinely irritate me how Mom would take the weekly television guide out of the Sunday Chronicle and highlight in yellow all the shows she planned to watch, all seven nights of the week.

I watched a hell of a lot more shows than were just mentioned. I just can't remember most of them now. I certainly do remember Days of Our Lives, because when I was 12 years old my mom was totally obsessed with it and I watched it regularly with her. I lost interest in it as I became a teenager, but Mom kept watching for many years to come, behaving as though a tragedy of Biblical proportions occurred if the VCR timer did not work on a given day.

When I think of my childhood, one of the memories that rings out the most is Mom yelling at the top of her lungs, "SHUT UP!" -- because my brother and I were talking too loud and she couldn't hear whatever she was watching. This occurred countless times.

Still, for a long time I had my own shows I liked to watch. I took my television viewing habits with me to college, even though all I had was my 12" black and white TV my mother had gotten me for Christmas when I was 13. I spent most of my Freshman year of college living in a room at Rogers Hall (almost eerily, the same room Andrea lived in four years earlier -- but that's an entirely different story) by myself, and I had no friends, so I watched a lot of television. Especially Picket Fences, which I insisted on watching every Friday night even when well-meaning people on my floor invited me to hang out with them. I remember watching figure skating then too; I don't know why that memory sticks out.

The shift occurred when I came back for my Sophomore year and the school put Gabe and me in the same room together. Gabe was never much of a TV watcher, but for the first two or three months of that school year he still allowed me to watch a few programs I couldn't let go of -- Picket Fences included, which went through its final season that year. Eventually the lifestyle I adopted while living with Gabe evolved into one that included less and less television. I spent a lot of time writing (people often thought I was doing homework on a Friday night, when in fact I was writing a letter), and every once in a while Gabe and I actually went out and did stuff together. Eventually my days consisted almost exclusively of school work and writing for my own benefit while irritating the shit out of Gabe with my Madonna, Pet Shop Boys or Prince CDs.

And so began the first extended period of time in which I abstained from television. Although there have been brief periods since when I have watched a little more TV on average, I have never found myself a regular viewer of a series again -- any time I watch TV it tends to be some sort of news (Today) or talk show (The Rosie O'Donnel Show, The View, Late Night with David Letterman). I used to watch Live with Regis & Kathee Lee a lot, and in fact that was what I was watching when I first found out about the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.

It was not until a year or two later, when Gabe and Suzy and I were all living together in our triplex in Pullman, that I turned on the TV again and discovered what I had been missing: SHIT. For the first time, it was crystal clear to me how awful the vast majority of any television programming is. This has happened to me consistently ever since; I find myself in someone's home, for example, and they're watching something idiotic like The Real World or Everybody Loves Raymond, and I immediately find myself thinking, Thank GOD I don't have to deal with this at home.

Maybe the overall quality of television programming was better twenty years ago, I don't know -- I wasn't allowed to watch then. But with few exceptions (the Discovery Channel or maybe the History Channel or something like Biography), any and every exposure I get to television these days just makes me want to hurl. This has been the case for a very long time.

And in the past six or seven years, when my average television viewing catapulted to two hours a day, it was in the worst of times: no job, and feeling like I'd rather degrade myself with the likes of The View than have to continue with looking for work. The experience was something that transcended "guilty pleasure" and veered dangerously into the territory of mental disorders.

The standard production quality of network programming is certainly bad enough, but what I find by far the most revolting about television is the media saturation via sickeningly biased news sources, and most significantly, through commercials. I am currently of the mind that television commercials are the single most prolific and effective means of manipulating the populace at large. Lucky for me, I feel largely immune to it due to my aversion to just about every aspect of television.

Just looking at any given frame on a television program or commercial, it's difficult to know where to begin when listing all the things I find wrong with it. The loud volume, or the loud graphics? The busy promotions, or the busy editing? Ugh.

Canned laughter. Sweeps week. "Season finale." "Must-see TV." "Stay tuned." "Season premiere." Number-one network. Million-dollar-per-episode salaries. Fox. Ew, ew, ew.

Don't get me completely wrong, now -- I know there are some things on regular network television that have a modicum of quality to them. I've seen a couple of episodes of The West Wing that I enjoyed. The problem is that for every West Wing, there are about 75 Drew Carey Shows, or Survivors, or Cops. What a bunch of crap. Even Will & Grace, which I have often found pretty funny, has the capacity to annoy me -- when one is not used to artificial laughter (live studio audience is irrelevant; they are coached and it is still artificial), one can only take so much of it.

I started life avoiding television because it was evil; now I avoid it because it's almost nothing but shit. The equipment used, the editing techniques (or lack thereof), the acting talent (or lack thereof), all make for television programming an unpleasant experience indeed. The way I see it, the disparity in quality is cavernous when comparing television with film. Granted, there are a lot of really shitty films out there, but I find it far easier to find decent films than to find decent television programming. Even decent shows like The Simpsons or South Park are nearly impossible for me to sit through just because of the god-awful, manipulative and often propaganda-spewing commercials. And if it isn't some company demanding that I buy their product, it's some news channel or program sensationalizing the most asinine concepts.

If there is a decent show, it's much easier (and feasible) for me to watch them on packaged DVD sets. Still, after seeing the first two seasons of Sex and the City, which I found to be of fair quality, I've gotten my fill and feel no desire for more. Even on an anything-goes network like HBO, the plot lines just get rehashed and freshness in programming lasts only a minimal amount of time.

Television shows always feel flimsy to me, like they are only barely put together at the last minute. Films can be poorly put together as well, but if the pieces are put together in the right way, they can still create a very solid and stable piece of very impressive art. Sort of like Legos, I guess. And if film is Legos, then television is popsicle sticks. Without glue.

I rabidly consume pop culture from many somewhat subversive angles. I very much like to know what's going on in the entertainment industry. And if something is going on on television that everyone is talking about and I should know about it, the time I spend online or reading Rolling Stone or Entertainment Weekly (my personal Bible) keeps me in the know. I don't have to turn my television on, especially considering most of the time I consider viewing television programs to be genuinely painful.

I paid $64 a month for cable for the first two years I lived in Seattle. I watched maybe an hour a month for about a year and a half of that, and then I realized the off chance of seeing a new Madonna video was not worth that price, especially if I never turn my television on to begin with. I spent approximately that much money per month on movie tickets anyway, and I find that experience far more entertaining, fulfilling, and enriching anyway. It doesn't hurt that it gets me out of my apartment.

I just have a different set of priorities. I realize that most people in the "civilized" world are rather partial to their television sets, and I guess that's okay -- for them. It's simply not for me. I find it to be of consistently poor quality, and a huge contributing factor to the degradation of American culture. But you know, that's just me. I've always been weird; I've never tended to be into the things that the huge crowds are into. I know there are a lot of programs on a lot of channels to choose from (suddenly a Bruce Springstein song comes to mind . . .), and there are options for every taste.

Well, almost every taste.

And then -- and then --

And then something happens on television that I wish to God I could have been there to see. Last night, the opening performance of the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards featured Madonna kissing Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera.



I have never been particularly partial to either Britney or Christina, but I have always loved watching Madonna in the midst of shocking acts; by the sounds of it, this performance ranked right up there with Madonna's performance of "Like a Virgin" at the first-ever VMA's in 1984.

And I missed it.

Because I think television sucks.

Well, I suppose no victory comes without some major sacrifice. Still, that was a rare moment in which it sure would have been nifty if I actually had cable . . .

. . . Never mind the fact that even if I did have cable, I probably never would have paid enough attention to realize the VMA's were even on, or if I did, I probably would not have remembered when they began and I would have missed it anyway.

Andrea says they will probably play it again and if they do and she catches it, she will tape it for me. So hey -- I guess it's all good, and there's still no reason to wish for cable, now is there?

Of course not. Madonna notwithstanding, the quality of MTV as a network has been in sharp decline since about 1986. That network is just as shitty as the rest of them, actually.

There are exceptions to every rule, and Madonna is one of them.

And so am I.
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Current Music: R.E.M., "King of Birds"