vividly remember the cable man’s initial visit to our home. He splayed a booklet open and slid it across a cleared dinner table as my family huddled ’round. He spoke of the magical world to which we would soon be given access – a world where kids had their very own network. And that was just one choice among many. But only so many. Mine was a thrifty clan and we kept things basic. It’s no wonder then, that as an adult and payer of my own bills, I opt out of subscription television altogether, staying off the grid, living as a technohemian, subsisting on rabbit ear antennae, DVDs and videogames for my entertainment fix.

Rabbit ears are kinda crappy, don’t get me wrong. There’s always a blizzard on CBS and sometimes the storm catches NBC, too. Bam, two channels gone, right off the bat. But it’s CBS, so I’m only really missing AFC football at worst (I mean, come on, this is the network that gave us Two and a Half Men, which, sadly, has now spread to syndication on KTLA and, therefore, clear reception, and, therefore, habitual viewing). And having NBC on-again-off-again provides a much-appreciated governor to Must See TV consumption. And that moment I realized holding one rabbit ear in my fleshy, bioelectric grip actually improved reception was a priceless moment of technohesion. Rabbit ears just want to be touched. I can relate.

There was more excitement upon discovery that the heavy, metal screen door component of my front door hugely impacted reception. These were high-end rabbit ears (which is possibly oxymoronic) and needed to be plugged in. The heavy, metal screen door was hinged to the wall bearing the outlet into which the rabbit ears were plugged. When friends would drop by, I’d notice a sudden surge in picture clarity accompanied by the whining of the screen door’s hinges and then the rap of friendly knuckles on my wooden front door.

One day I applied this practical knowledge and propped the screen door a few notches past wide open and lashed it to the front railing of my deck with bungee cords. Metal and electricity worked in concert, forging a super antenna, the wide-open screen door becoming a rabbit ear hearing aid. I sated myself on riveting, crystal clear AFC football, then discovered the full day’s lashing had bent the shit out of the screen door’s hinges to the point that pushing the door closed until it latched amounted to setting a mousetrap. With the fear of security deposit loss heavy on my heart, I abandoned the super antenna concept and took the rabbit ear in my crackling, fleshy grip once more.

Scraping my entertainment together by broadcast alone, I find myself watching a lot of KCAL 9 (and since it’s owned by CBS, I’m not totally frozen out of the Tiffany network). It’s an obscene amount of live, local and late-breaking, with the channel producing and airing hour upon hour upon hour of newscasts a day, but

it does give a great sense of place. Its bland presentation pierces the star-studded fog of Hollywood and pegs the dusty soil under girding our city of angels. Stirs childhood memories of cross-country family vacations, watching the morning news in motel rooms, getting the lay of the land. Hearing of traffic snarls and city council votes and weather reports in different accents, under different lighting, but essentially the same. Chicago, Louisville, Orlando, Bangor, Washington, D.C.; Pigeon Forge, Cincinnati, Amarillo, Fond Du Lac, Issaquah, Pittsburgh, Phoenix, Twin Falls, Fort Wayne. Los Angeles? Might as well be Tulsa when you’re watching KCAL.

Harold Greene? How the fuck did this guy end up on TV in the entertainment capital of the world? It’s that Tulsa feel. The city unglamorous. Clippers fans in the Showtime city. The true, blue-collar blood coursing through the glittering steel and monumental concrete body of cities worldwide. The population making themselves ugly with joy on a Saturday night, humoring the hustlers and loons on the train but not getting taken, stepping lightly over streams of piss and knifing through patches of cloying body odor on Spring, punching the clock with pragmatic vigor on Monday, raising families, raking leaves, supping from the marrow of immediacy.

Had I a cable or satellite subscription, I’d be lifted to lofty planes where reception is immaculate and television offers foul/real language, open drug use and frequent breast exposure. Nice, but where is the local auto dealership? How do you know where you are when you’re swimming in national brands, head in the clouds, drugged by the technopiate into living abstractly at the corner of Madison Avenue and Hollywood Boulevard. But when you’re squeezing a rabbit ear in your hand and watching Cal Worthington hawk and gesticulate, you couldn’t be anywhere else than right where you are.

But I’m neither superhuman nor a masochist, and there’s only so much Huell Howser and Garth Kemp and That ’70s Show reruns a guy can take. KDOC helps a great deal, offering classics like The Twilight Zone, I Dream of Jeannie, The Wild Wild West, Cheers, and repeated airings of The Endless Summer, but living off past faves only keens the hunger for new, quality programming. I splurged for the cheapest DVD player I could find after the original player, a parental Xmas gift (most of my big ticket electrical gadgetry comes as a gift), went belly up.

And while watching movies on DVD is a wonderful experience in the strict rent-a-movie-night kind of way, the true joy of DVD technology is found in the presentation of a television series in complete season format. Like trade paperback collections of comic books, TV series DVDs allow condensed viewing of a medium usually divvied out piecemeal over a protracted timeframe. Plotlines are easier to follow, character development is more apparent, nuance appreciation rises; everything stays fresh and can be enjoyed in its entirety.

And while I spend sizable chunks of my viewing in the grip of nostalgia (hence my KDOC affinity), watching classics like Transformers Season 1, The Prisoner, Here Come the Brides, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, The Fall Guy, CHiPs, and Diff’rent Strokes, I do stay contemporary with shows like Reno 911, Nathan Barley, The Venture Bros., The Shield, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Rome. And it’s important to keep up on contemporary premium kinetic visual entertainment because most of us work in offices and we’ve got to talk to each other about something and small talk about spent weekends and physical ailments and people I don’t know and will never meet gets old pretty fucking quick. Besides, talking about the same show gives that shared experience feeling; like the Hindenburg conflagration, the Challenger explosion or 9/11 (though, note, these were all broadcast events).

Naturally watching a show on DVD puts me at least several months behind the subscribers, but ever since TiVo blew primetime to shit, the viewing window has proven elastic. People do things in their own sweet time, renting whole series from Blockbuster or Netflix. TiVo, iPod, newsgroups … everyone’s locking themselves into elaborate and individualized digital worlds while rushing through the communal physical realm like a cat caught in a sudden downpour. And I’m no exception.

I’ve strolled up to Vons with my iPod (another Xmas gift) budded firmly in my ears, strolling the aisles with the new Holy Fuck EP thumping, pushing a shopping cart lockstep to a beat to which only I am privy. And I dig the beat, I really do, but I miss the symphony of humanity just beyond the earbuds; the child proudly slamming a retrieved pack of shredded mozzarella into his mother’s shopping cart, the couple debating the merits of a bottle of wine, the overly friendly produce man making sure I’m finding everything okay, parsing out what the woman in front of me in line and the cashier are talking about with my high school Spanish. Budded, my mind splits between here and there and when you’re only halfway up, you’re neither up nor down. Such is the danger of technology: building baubles of mass distraction and existential insulation.

Not all baubles isolate. My handheld Nintendo DS (merry Xmas again) has enough tinkling audio and flashing lights to send me into autistic ecstasy, but its multiplayer function reaches out to a real, honest-to-goodness people, linking for direct-if-virtual competition. Sure, the WiFi could potentially link me to the far ends of the earth, but I prefer sitting around my living room with friends, drinking beers and playing MarioKart or Brain Age 2 or Tetris head-to-head; hooting and hollering, talking shit, laughing ’til the tears come.

On comes the sense of technomunnion, the digital and physical embrace. Sacks of crackling biomass hold electrically animated constructs in their once knuckle-walking hands and respire the charged ether; the tension of past and future pressing in on the present from opposite sides, squeezing it tight as a hand ’round a rabbit ear.