“You got to let go of remote control.”

— Michael Franti and Spearhead

My wife and I agree on most things. She’s never wrong and I’m never right, so it works out well.

When we moved up here to the North Country, however, we both agreed we’d rough it … no TV in our new home. So the first night, after unloading all the furniture, clothing, books, lamps, knickknacks and paddywhacks we brought up from New Jersey, we did something a lot of folks have stopped doing exactly because they have a TV — we sat on the floor among all the boxes and talked. We planned, we dreamed, we celebrated.

Of course, time and the occasional session of blankly staring at each other wore us down, so, eventually we did have the dang television hooked up. Okay, two televisions.

I don’t exactly know what I was expecting, but TV up here is basically the same as down there: It’s all crap. And so much crap!

Maybe you remember back in the early days of the cable TV explosion, when Bruce Springsteen put out a song entitled, “57 Channels (and nothing on)”? Looking back, that song seems so quaint, doesn’t it? He even did a video for it which makes it even quainter. Now there are (by a 2021 Federal Communications Commission count) at least 1,758 stations in the United States. And, you guessed it … still ain’t nothing on.

The gospel truth is I don’t watch anything on TV because I can’t find anything on TV. Fifty-seven channels? If only there were just 57 channels! Oh, I’ll eventually run across something like M*A*S*H* that I can watch. Even a blind squirrel finds a nut occasionally.

(WARNING: This is fast becoming a column about age. For readers below 50 years old, parental guidance is suggested.)

Okay, so I’m 66. The cat’s out of the bag. And just using that phrase proves it! So I remember the day that I heard about a channel, not only exclusively dedicated to sports, but it would be on air 24/7! “Are you guys nuts?” I asked, not realizing my incredible short-sightedness. “How much sports can a person watch?” As it turns out, I’d be surprised…

And there was CNN, MSNBC, FOX News and more that planned on broadcasting news 24/7. And a channel exclusively devoted to cooking, of all things. And music videos (whatever they were). Followed by channels dedicated to history, golf, crocheting, cartoons, dogs, cats, alligators, sex, movies, weather … and almost overnight, most households went from five or six available channels to at least 1,758.

Yep … hit the remote and there’s a remote chance of finding something you might want to watch.

Okay, so here’s another age-worn fact: Not only were there just five or six channels to watch, but you better watch between the hours of 6 a.m. and midnight. Because after that, those five or six channels went off the air … completely! If you’re too young to actually remember that, can you even imagine such a thing? You’d turn on the television at, say, 12:05 a.m., and there was nothing on … Nothing. Zilch. Nada … on any channel! The only thing to see on this fairly new, exciting, visual medium was something called a “test pattern,” usually a non-moving (otherwise known as still) illustrated Native American in full headdress or an American flag waving in slow motion followed by a screen of circles with the station’s call letters in the middle … that’s it … for SIX HOURS STRAIGHT! Truthfully, there was something about them that was reassuring — you knew you weren’t missing anything.

Now some among you might wonder what in the world we did during those six long hours of darkness and social incarceration … no TV, no computers, no internet, no cell phones.

Well, we … connected … with … each other … in various … ways … oh, go ask your parents!