accursed /əˈkərst/

The glass tit, Stephen King called it. Right away I knew what he was referring to. The box from which we suck our toxic mental nutrition. The boob tube.

I didn't so much reject TV, back at the turn of the millennium, as fall out of the habit while more useful habits formed. The airwaves seemed nothing but idiocy at that time and I've yet to glean any clues that the boob realm has improved since then. Has it?

"Do you watch the such-and-such show?" people ask.

"I don't watch TV at all," I say, with pristine annunciation.  

And then, invariably, they delightedly try to tell me all about their favorite show while I silently search the sky, yearning to be kidnapped by aliens. It doesn't occur to people that if I have no time to waste watching TV then hearing about TV is presumably a bigger waste.

I’m not sure what’s more comical: sit-com dopes, pea-brained advertising, bubble-head blatherers of quasi-news? Does all this vapidity flatter us by setting such low intellectual bench-marks? As long as we’re at least a modicum brighter than the fools and jesters of the screen?

It seems to me another prime power in the structure of the matrix, goading us into the doldrums; dulling and doping the sheep that we would more easily be led.