October 1st: Independence Day

On October the first I get connected proper to the internet. I am not familiar with Ontario's residency laws yet but I thought just to be fair I'd give Chapters one week's notice that I was moving out. I'm going to miss the lady who sits near the fireplace with an eight pound stack of magazines, and the man who fakes reading a geography text book in the corner of Sci-Fi and Fantasy so he can sleep when the store is low on nerds.

With the internet will, I hope, come the death of the cable t.v. being on. The one bedroom is not condusive to ever being somewhere that you can't hear the t.v. when it's on. If you had asked me, "Kyle, do you think you have the burning need to watch reruns of Community that you've already seen five times before?" I would have said no, not if I had my mind on my money and my money running out because I'm jobless. I was wrong. All of our crotchety Grandparents were right, and our vegitable Grandparents who couldn't be torn away from T.V. classics even to come to Thanksgiving dinner were just the first victims of it. The television is a devil box. It's not because reality shows are a flipped Geo away from being a literal human-trainwreck and it's not because CSI can't get through an episode without killing a stripper, interviewing a stripper or staking out a strip club. It's because there are sixty shitty shows on at any one time and when those end there are another sixty on. You can spend fifteen minutes just flipping through all those choices before you verify, because there are always a few on commercial, that all of the shows on at that moment are awful, but by then you may as well catch the end of something. Standards fall infinitely low unbelievably fast. You reaquaint yourself with watching commercials. I can name all three current cover girls. And it goes on, and it goes on. Even if you download an entire season of something, an end comes. It might cost you four days and breaking a date you forgot you made on Plenty of Fish, but an end does come. The natural human emotion of remorse stands a decent chance of shaming you into not downloading again for maybe a week.

I just want it to end. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to drink and watch Independence Day. It's on A&E.