Lazy Sunday afternoon in the middle of winter, loafing on the couch looking for something to watch on television, should’ve known better...football season over and I don’t care for basketball...went through the potato chips and was setting my sights on whatever else I had laying around the house not being fussy...in younger days, only eight channels to choose from, yet I could usually find something to watch that was somewhat interesting...today though was a challenge...a college basketball game between Eastern Somebody and Western Somebody Else didn’t hold my interest since I hadn’t bet on either, so I went channel surfing and it was a light chop...came upon an old episode of ‘Here’s Lucy’ starring Lucille Ball who was a big star in the 50’s...it was showing on some religious channel for some reason...hell, that’s probably all they could afford...I’m not one to watch religious channels...I might learn something...but there wasn’t anything else on and this old show caught my eye...frequent commercial breaks...where they had a pair of smiling wholesome looking hosts asking for money of course and the hosts told us they were proud to show programs such as ‘Here’s Lucy’ and called it great family entertainment...yeah Jack, but whose family?...maybe fifty or sixty years ago this may have been true in what was a simpler, innocent society but now?...I seriously doubt any families were gathered around the television today watching Lucy...Mom’s trying to finish up her consulting work on the computer, Dad should be out in the garage installing a manifold or fixing a carburetor but I forgot this is modern times so Dad’s washing the clothes and straightening his apron getting ready to cook dinner...kids either aren’t home or are locked away in their rooms looking at their phones, listening to music, and doing who knows what with them...not enough car chases, shootouts, or people saying fuck this or fuck that to keep anybody’s interest these days...too much dysfunction, dysfucksion, and jadedness...it wasn’t long before I grew tired of the host’s earnestness and pleas for money and continued my search...the next channel was an obscure one that featured an even more obscure old black and white western...god, where they dig this one up from?...I watched for a few minutes and didn’t recognize anybody in it...it seemed to me that it must have been made in the 1940’s based on the poor video and sketchy audio...I’m not sure I could have recognized anybody in it even if I knew them...they used to make spaghetti westerns, but this film lacked both the spaghetti sauce and the pasta...it was pure crap on a chipped plate...I couldn’t imagine that anyone else in my viewing area was actually watching it...if there was another television tuned to it, it probably occurred when a dog accidentally stepped on a remote control...even then, dogs have got more sense than to watch that garbage and then probably went in the bedroom to jump up on the bed and take a nap...there were some infomercials that desperately wanted my money, what little of it I had, and they weren’t getting it...finally gave up and turned the TV off wondering how there was always something decent to watch on those eight channels long ago.
