Television

In 2005, before moving into a pretty mediocre apartment with a pretty fucking outrageous key deposit (and a pretty, crazy girl/wife), I had my eye on a flat screen, 42-inch plasma TV, the crux of my achievement, or so I believed. See, I was earning a lot of money, most of it in savings and tax free, the glut of it going toward nothing tangible, and me with a penchant for only one thing: a big television. I wanted that TV like nothing else, and neither God nor my ex-wife would stop me from getting it, although I'm sure both tried. In the end*, I paid close to five thousand dollars for what would turn out to be the Atari 2600 of televisions. Early Adapter? Easily fooled, more like it.

In more ways than one. My ex-wife, God damn her living soul, would never let me forget about that television, the sole luxury of four years spent under her tyranny. In the end (and, Jesus, that's an abridgment if ever there was one), we got divorced, I kept my sanity, my daughter, my soul...but so long television. Fare thee well.

Enter: redemption. I've spent a lot of time over the span of nearly three years pondering outwardly and inwardly, but mostly -- word to The Cranberries -- in my head, meditating on all of my past transgressions, all the wrongs I should have righted, every little mistake I may have made...and I cannot come up with a single foul deed. Save, maybe, for having a mania for a cool television like Mr. Toad had a mania for a motor car.

If that's wrong, I don't want to be right. A man, after all, needs his hobbies. And I don't think mine are too grandiose or hurtful. Certainly, no one in Somalia has died -- yet -- over a plasma television. Can I live?

I think I can. Rebirth and all that, it's not me, it's you.

It was always you.


* That's premature, as are all things in life and Mario Kart.