All is darkness

STIPIMM: “Let it Be,” by the Beatles

A good friend of ours passed away today; one of our best friends and one that’s stuck by me ever since he came into my life in five years ago. His passing was not unexpected; both Bridget and I had known for a few weeks that this was going to happen, but it doesn’t make the loss any less difficult.

His name: Standard Cable.

In some wicked bastardization of The Night Before Christmas, a jolly fat man in a suit came into our apartment complex, and instead of giving us toys and goodies, he brought only woe and despair as he switched off our digital cable service.

Yes, we asked for him to come. Yes, we wanted him to turn it off. But no, it does not make us happy, even knowing that we’ll save a lot of money on our monthly bills. Consequence #46 of living on a budget in Boston.

One of the more difficult things about all this is that I promised myself this would never happen. Back in the early days of this millennium, when I got cable in the first place, I was flush with money… well, not flush, but I was alone and bringing home a darn good paycheck every week. And so, I promised myself that I would never lose cable; it would be one of my priorities to maintain that primary font of news and entertainment.

I failed.

The fact is, we didn’t use most of the channels we had (we had the Premium Super Platinum Duplex Cable Package), and even paying for standard cable is too much of a burden on our wan budget. Bridget first suggested the idea months ago, but I fought it, going back to that promise I had made myself. But eventually, I did something that Congress can’t do: I realized that budget cuts would have to be made and that they would be painful.

Bridget’s original thought was to get rid of all the things which we relied on Comcast for, which included both cable and high-speed internet. One look at the fire that shot out of my eyes, and she realized that losing high-speed internet was a non-starter. The compromise was to go to Verizon DSL, which would have been an annoying transition with slightly slower speeds in the end, but significantly cheaper. Well, turns out Verizon doesn’t do DSL in our area, so we were stuck trying to figure out how to keep it with Comcast, and yet lose the cable without too much hassle.

Fortunately, Comcast, in its effort to get people on as many services as possible, makes it cheaper to get internet access if you’re a cable subscriber. The end result is that it was cheaper to keep basic (and I mean basic) cable and the internet than it would have been to eliminate all cable TV and keep the internet service. And so, we still have basic cable, allowing us to watch local channels and C-Span in crisp color. Whoo-hoo.

When Bridget called me today and let me know that the service had been switched over, I got a little melancholy. Not for too long, because I had a pile of forms on my desk to do, but for a little bit. What went through my mind were all the things Bridget and I were losing:

The Sopranos (new season in March)

CNN… CNN for fuck’s sake! This one will hurt the most when there’s a big breaking news story that’s not quite big enough for the big four networks to cover.

The 8,500 weekly episodes of Law and Order that we had access to. Now we only get three a week on NBC. What is this, the Dark Ages?

Deadwood

Huff (new season this spring)

The L-Word (Shane! Come back Shane!)

Entourage

Curb Your Enthusiasm

ESPN (ha! yeah, right. Like I give a damn.)

Bravo/Sundance/IFC/other snooty hip film channels

Comedy Central (sob!)

The Daily Show (sob! sob!)

VH1 and MTV (it pains me to say it, but I only really care about the former… age is a bitter mistress)

Did I mention CNN?

There is one net positive in this list: I will never have to be flipping through channels and see Faux News come up.

But overall, it’s going to be rough. Part of our compromise budget cut was resubscribing to Netflix, which has already started. It feels good to be back on that gravy train.

But I’m going to miss cable. God damn, am I ever going to miss cable.