Sleepwalk With Me_ And Other Painfully True Stories - Mike Birbiglia [52]
My neighbor Leslie had cable. It was fantastic. Our favorite show was You Can’t Do That on Television, but it seemed to me you could do anything on cable television. You could be flipping through the seemingly endless channels and at any moment you might hear the s-word or stumble across some exposed breasts. Whatever this new television service cost, it was worth it.
I asked my mom if we could get it and she said, “Like fun are we getting cable. That stuff is junk.” She talked about cable TV like it was porn. I think she was right.
I have cable TV in my apartment now and it’s sucking my life away. Because it makes me think things that are unimportant are really important. I’m like, I have to know about the sexiest music videos from the eighties. What would happen if I didn’t know about the sexiest music videos from the eighties? Would that mean I’m not sexy? E! answers questions that you were never going to ask, like, “I wonder how the show Full House was made?” Oh, in a studio with sets designed to look like the inside of a house? Fascinating!
What’s perhaps more scary is cable news, because, while dealing in minutiae just as meaningless, they claim to be important. One trick is they use these flashy graphics and laser sound effects like “Pachoo!” or “Brrrr-Bing!” And they treat every story with the same level of importance. They’ll be like, “Pachoo! Are your kids having sex at the mall?” I don’t even have kids, but I’m like, Are they? I gotta make sure they’re not having sex at the mall. Like fun are they having sex at the mall! And then the next story will be like, “Pachoo! Terrorists blow up bus.” And I’m like, Wow, that really puts the mall sex in perspective. That is much worse.
Cable news has another trusty trick, which is that they hook you in with questions you couldn’t possibly know the answers to. They’ll be like, “Pachoo! Do you know what’s in your soup?”
I’m like, Oh my God. I guess I don’t know what’s in my soup. I gotta stick around. I thought maybe broth but I wasn’t 100 percent . . . What is this, a commercial for Toyota? Okay, I’ll watch this, just as long as you tell me what’s in my soup.
And then they’ll be like, “Pachoo! It’s broth.”
I’m like, I knew it! I knew it was broth, but I wasn’t 100 percent. I’m glad I stuck it out.
And then they’ll be like, “Pachoo! Do you know what’s in your broth?”
I can’t believe this! How long do I have to watch to find out all the answers? But they never tell you the answers because they know if you knew the answers you’d change the channel or turn off the television. But I don’t turn off the television.
I watch it at airports, in hotels, in my apartment. I can’t do a four-minute treadmill run without checking in on Headline News, which is really the perfect network for the micro workout. You flip it on and the guys says, “Earth still spinning, wars still going on, planet still headed toward total death and destruction. Those are your headlines!” But at a certain point I realized that I needed more than this. I needed to do something at the same time. Which is why I started spending more time on the Internet.
The Internet, much like cable TV, is an infinite well of nothingness. And when you’re there, you’re convinced that it’s something. It’s like getting drunk. You’re like, I’m gonna go over here. And over there . . . and over here! And after four hours, you’re like, I don’t even know what happened. I gotta clear my history.
I always have these grand ambitions for the next time I’m going to be online. Like, The next time I’m on the Internet, I’m going to look up healthy recipes and gyms in my neighborhood. And then I go online and I’m like, I’m gonna Google myself again. And I don’t even Google myself anymore. I’m at the next level. I get