I guess this means ...

... it's making its way into my subconscious - my lack of cable.

Until the BIG DIGITAL SWITCH, even after having the Comcastards shut off my cable and haul away my beloved DVR, I could still get a fuzzy version of CBS.

Which is good, because for the most part I hate CBS. In my neck of the woods, it's KDKA, and any time I watch KDKA, I can feel wiry white hairs start to poke out of my scalp, and I have this irresistible urge to yell at kids to "get off my lawn!!"

Yep. The only reception I got was the station that has probably won the Gomer's Choice Award since its inception. Which, in a way, was good. It gave me a gradual step-down from having everything at my fingertips, tv-wise, to having almost nothing I cared to watch. Like nicotine patches for the couch and tv addict, at first I'd watch the news for hours on end, hearing the same story easily 6 times before, mercifully, Katie Couric would arrive with the Evening News and repeat it all only once more. Then, I'd grow increasingly bored with it, until I got to the point where I'd listen to 1/2 hour of local news while doing dishes in the next room.

THE BIG DIGITAL SWITCH then took place, and what seemed like 20 hours of the same news stories every day was replaced with 24 hours of a public service infomercial on THE BIG DIGITAL SWITCH. I read somewhere that cable companies tried an experiment with delinquent accounts, in which they would broadcast only C-SPAN, instead of shutting off service completely. Apparently it was very successful in resolving late and delinquent payment issues. This infomercial sort of reminded me of that.

My reaction, however, was a dream - a dream in which I found my 25 year old console tv suddenly digital-ready, with a hundred channels at my disposal - and still couldn't find one damn thing I wanted to watch.

Apparently my brain has finally accepted that we can survive quite well without tv... At least until winter.