This morning I dragged the ladder from the garage and pulled the satellite dish off the roof. I’d always hated the thing. That little billboard. Paying those people to advertise for them. Those white letters pronouncing to the world: We watch television!
I never liked the dish, and I didn’t like drilling a hole into our house, and I didn’t like their black wire worming in.
We’d lived with it for a long time, of course. Like most people do. We liked watching the Mariners. The news. Staying up late. Smoking a joint. Nowhere to go in the morning. Some college football too. Mostly, though, we watched a lot of movies. That was something we both loved. Good and bad. It didn’t much matter.
But now that Tess is gone, I don’t have the heart for them. And the news makes me want to kill someone. All that noise. All those chattering fools. And that kind of anger is no good for me.
Both my grandfathers died of heart attacks.
So did my father, as it happens.
I’m in the sludge today. There is no wide crystalline sky. No sharp edges, no florid poetry.
The fire does not appear cut from glass.
Today my eyes are smeared with Vaseline and I am thinking of my father’s .45.
Anyway, the television. I couldn’t stand to watch it. I wanted it out. That grey dish collecting all the trash of the universe and funneling it in through its insidious black wire. Something we’d paid for willingly. Eagerly. We’d invited the most hideous people into this house. All that cultivated outrage. All that ugliness. I should have put a bullet through our expensive screen, but instead I just wrapped it in an old blanket and propped it against the back wall of the garage.
Since then, I’ve started listening to more music. I don’t know a thing about it, just that I like some of it a lot. And I mean with an upsetting intensity. It could be anything, too. No particular genre. I treat music like paintings. I walk through a museum until I’m hit in the chest. I guess that doesn’t make me very sophisticated, but it suits me well. What do you expect from a guy with a subpar education?
Anyway, it’s the way I like to live when I like to live.