Idiot Box

I don’t think I’m going to live beyond 40. I’m 24. Once I managed to rationalize my current discontent, I realized that there is no way to eliminate this, and hence the only possibility involves struggle, strife, despair and death. I am no fortune-teller. I don’t wear bright patchy robes and I don’t have a crystal ball tucked inside. I just got distracted by an intense game of ping pong and stopped writing. I was distracted enough to stop writing this, this most important of passages, this text which is supposed to describe the infallible logic behind my precise prediction of my own downfall. I think I have ADD. I think that’s Attention Deficit Disorder. I've never heard it in full, it makes perfect sense. The electricity just went off for a 5 second period, but it kick-started a process which re-drew my attention to this most pressing passage. Its not that I missed the match in 5 seconds, but the way it works in my neck of the woods is that any power interruption forces all systems to reboot, whenever its restored. And my television takes about 10 seconds to reboot. That’s still just 15 seconds. So there’s more to it. You see, the channel in question is ESPN. ESPN is big here, it gets all the massive gigs, sports gigs, I like the word gigs, it sounds smooth, doesn't it? ESPN is a paid channel and according a recent (annoying) regulation, can only be viewed through this thing called a set-top box. I have reached a point where I am forced to define a set-top box. Excuse my impatience, but my immediate instinct was to question its relevance to the passage, but a few seconds and a bit of over-thinking made me realize that its most crucial, no detail must be spared, or I risk sounding unstable, or worse, irrational. I’m not irrational. I have been called a lot of things in my life, all contradictory, lots complimentary (lies) but I have never been called irrational. Not by the dumbest of strangers, not by the most malicious of friends. I couldn't bear that. I can see myself raging with anger at the sound of this crass insinuation and coming down upon the accuser with ungodly force, ending once and for all the pointless existence he has bothered the world with. I am not a murderer. A set-top box takes channels from some central broadcaster and brings them to my television, in a highly tracked and legal fashion. Helps track users. I’m in a land full of cheats.  The set-top box takes 20 seconds to reboot. An innocuous power interruption, worth the blink of an eyelid has cost me 35 seconds. I think the German guy won. I hope he did. The Chinese have dominated ping pong for too long now, rendering the sport boring and the matches a mere formality. The only interesting matches are when a Chinese guy plays another Chinese guy, but then that’s no longer international sport. I only watch international sport. One would expect, after 35 seconds of excruciating delay, at a crucial point of a fairly critical encounter, between the German and the Chinese, to finally be able to watch what remains of the match. Both the Chinese and the German guy were 2 points away from victory. Maybe I could've caught the last rally. But life isn’t fair. Its fucking disgusting.  The set-box company is incidentally, also a major telecom company around here. Their marketing guy is this fat, bald bastard in his mid-40s and over sized pants, who trots to work and spits ideas all over a plush, wooden boardroom. In one of his recent meetings, he announced, “We've found a way to make money off the dumb boxes”. All the other fat slobs, weary from sitting in their seats all day, perched their neck up in attention. “Every time the dumb box, our little box of gold, reboots, we’ll reset to a channel flashing ads of our sponsors”. And his face grew wider as he spoke the last words, into a smile but even wider, stretched so much that the smile also found it hard to survive, and was replaced by an open-mouthed search for reaction. The fat slobs burst out in applause. They all agreed, and didn't really care. So much for the fucking customer. It took me an additional 5 seconds to switch to ESPN, and by the time my little 40 second afternoon siesta ended, the players had walked off the table. I smashed the remote on the table, and decided to get back to writing this passage. The Chinese guy won. What a surprise.