That occasionally nagging breathing problem was back full bore this AM, forcing me out of bed in the ungodly pre-noon range of the daylight. A shower seemed to clear things up but I still feel lightheaded, and my innards are sore from spams of barfing air.

…..

Thinking today that money is to become less and less valuable. Cash money. I don’t t hink it could happen in this lifetime but i imagine a time when fewer and fewer things are worth money. Efficiencies of scale have inhaled millions of jobs, millions of livelihoods, billions of hours of productivity rendered moot by robots, software, and geniuses of diminution raking in trillions from nanopayments and macroeconomies of vapor.

The country’s top 4 companies employ less than 200,000 people. In the past auto makers and manufacturers led the charge on creating sure-thing jobs, menial and tedious but certain and reliable, the worker’s mindset of securing the lifelong job has not disappeared in correspondence with its vanishing reality.

There will come a day when there are too many people for the economy to support.

…..

Cutting the cord, or at least half of it, I think. I got an antenna for the television and expect to cancel the TV portion of TWCable in the coming weeks. I’ve had cable TV since the beginnings of tha tproduct. My sister and I happened to tune in at the very moment MTV went on the air. It was The Buggles singing “Video Killed the Radio Star”. With the exception of college and a year or so after that I have pretty much always had Time Warner Cable. It was through the Showtime channel that I heard the first 4-letter word come through a television. It was Carol Burnett saying “Oh shit” in “The Four Seasons.” I believe she and the others were on a boat in a lake. The next obscenity I heard through the television was “Fuck.” It was a play featuring two elderly people, I believe they were married and had been married for decades, and they seemed to hate each other. As tensions boiled over the woman addressed the man as “YOU… FUCK!” As I recall the scene the woman covered her mouth in horror, whispering in a ghastly hoarse voice that she had never said that word in her entire life. The man, as I recall, glowered and scowled and mumbled a bit but seemed to think no less of her for the use of the F bomb.

Those words shocked me. Never before had vulgarity come through the television. In time I would stay up late late late to see what bizarre fetishes presented themselves. I remember shaving cream-covered men dancing naked, visible from the waist down. The multiplicitous sex shows seemed mostly to be by and for gay men, or burlesque male dancers in the Chippendales tradition.

Being among the first to have cable TV we were also on the vanguard of people who stole programming and premium channels by sticking playing cards into the cable box. Our neighborhood was preposterously patrolled by Time Warner Cable police who slowly drove around the area announcing to cable subscribers and non-subscribers alike “IF YOU ARE STEALING TIME WARNER CABLE PROGRAMMING YOU MUST STOP.” Time Warner Cable flunkies never broke into anyone’s houses to stop these crimes but the threat lingered for years. Even as one too young for cynicism I found the corporate buffoonery hilarious, and we watched no small quantity of pilfered programming in the safety of our home.

All one had to do to steal programming was shove a playing card into the cable box. This stupidly simple technique opened up free movie and premium channels, which included more pornography (albeit non-hard-core) than I had ever imagined coming through the tubes of all the world’s televisions. It was not until college that I saw hard core pornography (a night still emblazened on my mind as if burned in by an anally-violating branding iron) but the soft core porns on Time Warner Cable’s Cinemax (aka Skinemax), Showtime and public access channels remain the standard bearer for my life’s nascent erotical titillation. Today when I see motels and hotels advertising “FREE HBO” my first thought is “BOOBIES!” (HBO was among the more family-safe premium channels, but if a motel had HBO I imagined it also might have Skinemax or Showtime and, thus, BOOBIES… I did enjoy HBO’s “Not Necessarily The News”…)

Who remembers that David Duchovney, before his rise to stardom in the X Files, was a softcore pornmaster in Showtime’s “Red Shoe Diaries,” one of the first story-centric contributions to pornography that focused on the woman’s side of the story, or that looked at porn from the female perspective and not the male. Those were among the best roles for women in soft core porn. And the show starred David Duchovney!

We never had it at home but my uncle had those early Teletext TV boxes. I think that’s what it was. It had Reuters news headlines scrolling across the screen as live TV filled most of the screen. That is how I remember it. I think my dad had access to something like that when he lived in Valdosta. That was most likely the Time-Warner Interactive TV product, the reputation of which still echoed through the halls of Time Inc. New Media and Pathfinder when I got a job working on the WWW at that company in 1995. Time Inc. New Media (and Pathfinder in particular) was somewhat portentously assigned the same 4th floor space that had housed Time Warner’s Interactive TV, or Teletype, or whatever it was called. The irony was never lost on those early adapters of corporate New Media.

I don’t know what I might miss about Time Warner Cable Television. I will stick with their Internet cable modem service for now. As for TV, the antenna works just fine for as much TV as I watch these days. Between antenna and all that Internet content piped in to Roku and Blu-ray boxes I don’t think I’ll miss much from cable TV.