Knackered Tries TV with Benzos

     Hey there, Knackered here. Making sense of TV is turning out to be more work than he ever could have imagined.  

   Knackered’s ignored the thing throughout most of his taper. Weird stuff has screwed up his perceptions, his eyes seem to water at all the wrong times, and voices come and go.  

   For awhile he surmised that the blasted thing had just gone wonky.  But his wife can understand things just fine and quite often has to pause the programs and explain what’s going on. 

   A large part of the problem seems to center around the way that the programs arrive in front of them in the first place.  Knackered actually spent his single digit years living in front the family television. There were three channels, a dial you turned and an antennae that existed on the roof somewhere. If ‘static’ became a problem, the elder Knackered simply climbed up top and moved the thing (antennae of course) around while everyone screamed from below until things were somewhat clear again.  

   It was never great, but with ‘shades of grey’ (not the book…) there wasn’t a lot of clarity in the first place. Color came later and very few shows had it.  Unfortunately, they were usually ballets or some musical type of thing.  

   Remote control was something  that only happened on ‘Twilight Zone’ and the young Knackered’s got most of their exercise running back and forth between the couch and the viewing box.  Their language skills then developed over the need to argue over who’s viewing choices won out.  

   No house on the block had more than one working TV going at any one time.  Every family sent someone to the hardware store to have their tubes checked from time to time.  The elder Knackered favored licking his before inserting them into the machine.  Sometimes it helped.  

   With an enormity of channels and program selections nowadays, Knackered doesn’t  do much programming.  Nor does he mess with with controls.  Left by himself one weekend, he screwed stuff up so badly that his only choices ranged from cooking to reality junk.  ‘Naked and Afraid’ left him in much the same state.  

   Things happen fast on TV these days.  Knackered viewed the world in fifteen minute intervals, with three minute breaks; just enough time to pee and get a Pop Tart. With the ability to pause programs and go back to them now, folks don’t know how good they’ve got it. 

   Commercials were interesting and formed the basis of his first musical instruction.  They usually carried little ‘ditties’ that stayed in your head, forever.  “Winston tasted good like a cigarette should, Franz bread was good bread.  Its flavor was beyond compare. And Wheaties was the stuff to eat-‘The breakfast of champions.’

   Lately, Knackered has tried to make sense as to the difference between regular shows and commercials. They (the commercials) come at you in hyper speed. Teasers of other programs are mixed in and he often can’t figure out the difference between anything.  Such problems.  

   Ads during dinner time nowadays feature everything from underwear (always female) to all things pharmaceutical.  Medical ads feature people who are ecstatic over the stuff they take for wellness.  They dance all over the place and often burst into song at the water cooler.  The side effects, always subtitled in micro print, warn of everything from projectile vomiting and diarrhea to loose or missing appendages.  Not a good outlook for what ails a person. Knackered often wonders what happened to the  ads and warnings signs for Benzos? 

   Their internet bill includes that recording box. Knackered isn’t really sure what it does though.  There are no holes in it to insert anything. He favored the days when you just went to the store on Friday nights and brought home smaller black boxes that contained the movie you were dying to see. At least that way you didn’t wind up naked and afraid.