ADVENTURES IN CORD CUTTING #11: THE DEED IS DONE…ALMOST

OCTOBER 5, 2014 2 COMMENTS

Wow, this has taken a long time. I don’t think there’s ever been a bandage that has been removed so slowly and with such trepidation. I’m not sure why that is. I will chalk it up to addiction. Not just the suckling at the glass teat but the nectar of all I can drink from the source.

See, I can remember when cable was new. We didn’t have it. Chatham Township wasn’t wired for it at first. My cousins in Union, they had it. So, on weekends I would drive my parents’ van across Jersey to hang out with my cousin and her best friend and her best friend’s boyfriend (who are still together today!) and we would just watch MTV all night in the friend’s basement. The number of times I saw Marillion suggests I should remember at least ONE of their songs. I do not.

My family got cable when I was away at college. I came home to a strange box with a LOT of buttons and if you pushed three of them at the same time, you could get some semi-coherent image of what looked like it might be naked people. But that was unreliable at best. It wasn’t until I was living on my own, in a studio apartment up the street from Mann’s Chinese, that I decided to get cable for my apartment. It was a big occasion. I recall the cable guy showing up and giving me all that glorious access…on my 10″ little color box that I had found,  actually, on the streets of the lower west side, under an overpass near 10th ave. There was no on/off switch, so you had to pry it out with tweezers or use the back end of a pen, jammed on to the nub to pull it out. But it was mine.

And, lo and behold, cable. Of my own. Finally.  I’m one of those people who likes the tv on in the background. It’s like a window to the rest of the world. Let me know I’m not alone. But, those days are over now.  For this week we came to the end of that three month HBO promotion. We contacted DirecTV and we put our membership on suspension.

And.

Just to cement it in a little bit. I bought our first season pass to a television show. The Walking Dead. We will watch it on Amazon, starting next week. If all goes well, we will make the suspension permanent.