Your Television Loves You [Act 1]
by boh3m3 on Oct.11, 2008, under Random Thoughts
…and it’s going to kill you some day.
When I was small enough to consider a cardboard box equivalent to spaceships, submarines and time machines, Television was my friend. More than that, I think. Television was family.
I sat every morning with my father, eating Coco Puffs1, watching about 15 minutes of Woody Woodpecker before my dear old dad inevitably turned on aerobics.
I remember asking on a few occasions why we watched the female exercises and not the male ones, especially since he never followed along. It wasn’t a long time later that I realized watching women in swimsuits jiggle and bounce to shitty music was a great deal more manly than actually working out.
My Television aficionado continued into my teenage years. I watched MTV go from broadcasting music almost all day, every day to it’s current Dark Side incarnation which has, ironically enough, damn near nothing to do with music. I got acquainted with Ren and Stimpy. I laughed at the Upright Citizen’s Brigade and Kids in the Hall. I was deeply disturbed at VH1’s sense of self-satisfaction.
Then, the very day after I graduated high school, I moved out. I moved far away from Florida, my father’s big screen television and ridiculous cable channels to my mother’s apartment in Alabama. It was a fall from grace almost to hard to bear. Thought the bruises would never heal up.
Her television, you see… it was small. And it only had basic channels coming in spottily. Her VHS tape player worked well enough, but she only had a copy of Druids, starring Christoper Lambert and a really shitty wig.
I quickly went cold-turkey. Not an easy feat, since at the time she only had dial-up internet and a burning need to actually receive phone calls. I got a job at Wal-Mart and tried (and failed) to join the Marines. You can see just how much not having television effected me, I’m sure.
A few years later, I moved in with some other 20-somethings downtown in an area known as “Five-Points.” They were waiters, like me. And like other waiters, I found, they loved pot and Adult Swim. These were fellow Children of the Coaxial.
1: That is, of course, until the fateful morning that my father’s robe failed in it’s duty. I turned, chomping on my Coco Puffs, to the left towards my dad and (as I was on the floor, head level with the coffee table) saw lurking in the shadows of the old brown robe something no child should have to see. To this day, I still have not gotten the courage to eat a single Puff of Coco, and my father has probably wondered why at that age I had a sudden distaste for the cereal I had loved for so long.
Continue to Act 2!
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October 11th, 2008 on 8:17 pm
Coco puffs are still amazing. You should get over that traumatic event and revisit your childhood with a yummy bowl of chocolatey goodness.
(Love from the coco puffs promotional board.)
October 11th, 2008 on 9:07 pm
gah i miss kids in the hall :( and coco puffs….meh…Fruity Pebbles…way better
October 11th, 2008 on 11:23 pm
Heather Locklear looked absolutely delicious in that old 80’s YouTube aerobics clip. The misadventures of Ren Höek and Stimpson J. Cat were never the same, once John Kricfalusi was handed his walking papers from Spümcø. The HTML codes in the 6th paragraph deserve a stinging slap. I, also, love pot and Adult Swim (always a dishpig, never a food servant). And, you were too smart to be a US Marine - Go Army!
October 11th, 2008 on 11:30 pm
@OzBro: GAH! Another mistake. Thiefree already pointed out a bunch, but thanks for bringing that to my attention. I write all of these out in WriteMonkey and forget to put it in the “html” section of the blog post window.
October 12th, 2008 on 6:10 am
I don’t think I’ve ever seen an equivalent of coco puffs in Australia but I’m sure we have some kind of cereal with an equivalent amount of sugar but if we don’t it’s usually added in it’s raw form afterwards.
Not a pleasant childhood memory Ben, coco puffs ruined forever.
October 17th, 2008 on 3:07 pm
I think i might die if something so terrible suddenly turned me off from Coco Puffs forever. It’s really the only cereal i eat.
November 14th, 2008 on 11:53 am
Bet it was a mole that resembled a cocoa puff, kinda like the one Lemmy from Motorhead has on his face, but elsewhere…