Thinking it over ...

The stuff of which television is made

By Félix Alfonso Peña
© 2008 Félix Alfonso Peña
All rights reserved*
10 March, 2008

Seven pounds of compacted fecal matter — now that’s vindication.

Actually, the fellow was talking seven to 12 pounds of fecal matter when the automatic channel finder landed on the show where he was earnestly nodding his head and telling viewers about how much compressed doo-doo the average person might carry at any given time.

And I felt immediately vindicated, not about laxatives or colonics, but about not having watched television for some 28 years.

You see, I was setting up a new, flat-screen television set, the replacement for a barely serviceable 20-plus-year-old set that has been on its last legs for a while.

We used the old set to watch videos and DVD’s. Until a few months ago, it was not even connected to an antenna or cable, but when we wanted to upgrade to a high-speed Internet connection, and Verizon crapped out on DSL availability, we opted for cable.

We didn’t tell our 17-year-old daughter about it, which caused a scary moment for her when she turned the DVD player off and suddenly a real television show started playing on the set.

She told us she thought the set had become somehow haunted and immediately turned it off.

But even after we broke the news to her, she largely ignored the television shows and continued watching videos and DVDs.

We, of course, continued not watching shows.

But when we got the new TV in early February, I wondered what we had been missing. So when I connected it to the cable system and turned it on, I watched as it automatically went through the live channels and automatically entered these into its lineup.

And the first thing I saw was that man pointing out how many pounds of packed poop we habitually carry, and how serious that was.

Thankfully, the channel changed automatically at that point, and I felt no urge to dial back to hear the rest of the story.

I assume the man was part of an infomercial or other plug — pardon the irony — for a bowel cleansing product.

Be that as it may, it was enough to convince me that my wife and I have not missed much by avoiding television since 1980. Hence, the vindication.

After all, what do we gain from a medium heavily invested in creating need where none existed? Buddhists tell us that desire, need's inseparable twin, is the source of all misery. Who needs more misery?

And, assuming that the human digestive tract has remained largely unchanged from an evolutionary standpoint for hundreds of thousands of years, why mess with success?

Our ancestors eking out a living on the African plain, or their successors spreading out across six continents, did so with compacted fecal matter in their guts, too. Why should I worry about it?

Of course, that was before anybody thought to measure how much high-density poop we were packing, much less tried to convert the mass into gold through some trick of marketing alchemy.

In the Stone Age, poop was simply poop. It had its place, and that included a sojourn in the gut. When the urge struck to divest oneself of it, it was off to the midden or the nearest appropriate spot. It likely never got a second thought after being left to turn into nutrients for the soil.

And who’s to say where poop begins? We know the end product — apologies for the pun — and we know its origins as food, but at what point can it be declared poop so that somebody can scam us out off getting rid of it sooner than we ought?

Maybe part of the “compacted fecal matter” is really pre-poop — wannabe fecal matter on its way to its culmination?

Everything — smelly or otherwise — has its place, after all, earnest infomercials notwithstanding.

The world was foolish enough when people wasted their time trying to turn lead into gold.

Perhaps my daughter’s initial reaction was right: television is haunted, and we should be scared of it.