Title.

I hate cable. I hate cable much in the way one hates the beautiful, emotionally abusive freak-in-the-sack you can't bring yourself to detach from because with her you experience the most intense physical pleasure* of your life.

Last night our power went out. Actually the power in the entire international district chose to provide evidence to Fate's racism.

Mere minutes. Mere minutes without our televisions and the building in it's entirety was walking around and chatting with previously unknown neighbors. It was a most pleasant black out. Out in the courtyard gazebo several of us gathered in the dim sphere of my lantern. When the cold proved too much we wound up under an emergency light in the stairwell with several other neighbors. I even found time to meet, fall in love with, and subsequently grow to loathe an entirely new woman. In the televisioned world that took me nearly 2 years!

The mind boggles at the immediacy of the effect. It's as if the power was a rope from which we hung, nothing but open air between us and the snapping maw of sociability below. When the power went out that rope snapped. And let there be no shred of doubt; television was a major fiber in that rope.


*I feel it is important to underscore the rhetoric nature of the 'pleasure' I draw from watching tv. Merely in the world of poorly constructed metaphors is there any sort of 'intense physical pleasure' to be had.