Steven Basic

Post 283: Late Night TV, p2

Added 2022-08-26 15:53:08 +0000 UTC

I…hadn’t seen TV for a while. I just plain old hadn’t had one since Sheryl had kicked me out, since I’d moved into this tiny little upper-floor studio over the office. Even before that, though, I was never a big television watcher. I’d generally rather entertain myself with a book, a movie…or these days perving over pictures of Melissa. But earlier today I’d come home after work to find that Marisela had set up a big-screen TV in my apartment for me, perched precariously on a stand, sitting atop an old dresser in the corner. She’d hooked me up with a bunch of streaming services and channels, and connected it all somehow to a plain little black box and an old-timey looking remote with what were certainly not English command symbols. Cool, I guess…it looked sorta fishy but there’d be no bill or fee or whatever, she told me, and therefore I didn’t ask too many questions. Pirated? Probably. But I couldn’t afford subscriptions, let alone the 72” flat screen that now dominated my apartment and at which I now stared from my threadbare couch at 2am.

TV was weird, these days. I watched the network news for a while, earlier. Everyone was talking about these three missing teens, disappeared since Trick-or-Treating on Halloween night. They suspected foul play from the kid who was with them, the one with the crazy story about witches with tentacles. In fact I’d seen an interview with Sheila Frances, the new medical director at Riverview Hospital, the place from which I’d recently had my privileges suspended and where the boy was currently being held for observation. “We expect the toxicology reports to come back positive,” she’d said to the interviewer, a busty brunette, “but in the meantime the policewomen are still with him.”

I found it funny how she made a point to say ‘policewomen’. That when talking about the investigators, or the team of docs working with the kid, she referred to them all as ‘she’ or ‘her’. I found it unusual that the interviewer, the news anchors, the sports reporter, and the weather person for this local news squad…they were all women. Most of the actors on the ads, the main leads on the majority of the shows I flipped through: all female faces. Young and attractive, lots of times shapely. Had this trend, this fixation for the tall and buxom, already changed TV’s landscape like this? Or was I just imagining things? I mean, I wasn’t complaining. I mean…wow. Look at the knockers on her…this new sitcom about life on Mars? Apparently NASA has new standards for its astronauts haha. Or the girls on this 24-7 reality TV show? “Celebrity House of Trouble”? Wait…did I recognize that one?

Yikes, 2am. I'd been straight-up channel surfing for hours, now bleary eyed and exhausted but unable to look away, sitting in the dark, bathed by the ghostly, flickering light of the screen. I chalked it up to its newness, made my excuses that I was just checking out what sort of stuff Marisela had hooked up for me, told myself I could sleep in tomorrow. But I was basically like a zombie - click, click, clicking through the channels I’d been given. Networks and streaming services: some I knew, many I didn’t recognize. Cooking channels, travel channels, sports channels. Weird stuff, on the outskirts. Foreign languages, broadcasts from overseas. Special interest channels like…dog grooming. A ‘Men’s Network’…what’s this, now?

It was labeled as ‘Men’s Special Interest Television’ on the guide, and by the looks of it was a pretty new addition to the channel lineup, deep in the high channel numbers, broadcasting only late at night. But…wow. It caught my attention. Jesus - the host for whatever sort of show they were playing, something about video games, could be a porn star with hipster glasses. I actually watched it for a bit, raptly absorbing their review of some new entry that involved, holy shit, look at the jugs on that enormous vampire lady. She’s huge…

The segment was over, and suddenly now it was a cooking show. “Dani in the Kitchen”, whose bosomy, MILF-y chef coo’d at the camera like she was talking to a little lost child. Christ almighty Dani can make dinner for me any time. Now it switched to a sports report, now coverage of women’s bodybuilding, now just straight-up tits on the beach. Camera shots lasted moments, scenes and programming changed quickly. Whatever this channel was, it obviously pegged its audience as having attention spans measured in moments and IQs in the double-digits…and I couldn’t look away.

Even the ads…lord, especially the ads…were filled with content playing into man’s basic instincts to just flat-out stare and lay docile when shown the right curves, the proper swells and smiles. Cleavage and soft-core and busty political candidates pitching themselves before the election bulged from my screen and I caught myself with my mouth agog, even at the political ads. Had I been watching this channel for more than two hours already? I don’t remember much, now, as I was eventually drifting in and out of sleep, but could still probably recite word-for-word that voice-over from the self-promoting station-identification piece that played in nearly every commercial break, layered over imagery that seemed custom crafted for someone like me…