On my current austerity budget, I don’t have cable television.  In addition I don’t have a digital receiver since I did not have the foresight to avail myself of one back when the city was handing them out.  Because of the aforementioned budget, I won’t buy one.  Gwen my neighbor who knows something about just about everything, insists we can rig up an antenna with an angel food cake pan but so far that hasn’t happened.  Hence for the past year, I have had no TV.  It’s turned out to be a good thing.

For one, I don’t miss the News Torture Networks, and their mechanisms whereby one is swollen into a ball of fury that bounces from floor to ceiling because of something a congressional prick blabbed over national TV, and then is suddenly deflated a day later when the story dissipates.  Repeat.

I get a lot of news from my friend Nancy who can tell me every time I have deconstructed a thought, and hates it that I continue to use that tag-line because she thinks it makes her sound one dimensional which she assuredly is not.  We walk around Green Lake every week and if something critical (or juicy) is going on, Nancy tells me about it.  I would like to say that I rush home and read about it in the New York Times on-line but that would be misleading.  What my Aunt Frances would call A Lie.

While I am not a bit adverse to misleading you (or lying) for literary reasons, I can’t write this blog without revealing that I still watch TV.  I just don’t do it at home.  Once a week I spend the evening watching TV with my multi-dimensional friends Chris and Dee and their three Chinooks.  Chris, my unclassifiable friend recently proof-read and justified all the margins of my book that is currently at the publishers (yay!) Dee always misses church because she is continually out practicing witchcraft and becoming a lesbian.

Chinooks look kind of like German Shepherds but they are sled dogs like Siberian Huskies.   The difference between a Chinook and a Siberian Husky is that if you fall off the sled, a Chinook will notice.    Nancy and I sometimes have her friend’s Siberian Husky with us when we walk around the lake.  Rika sets off with a job to do, one which doesn’t include a lot of socializing.

Chris and Dee’s Chinooks are Willow, Starfire and Enzo.  I began a major campaign a few years ago to ingratiate myself with Starfire because it disturbed me that she was afraid of me.  I won the campaign.  Now she likes to be on my lap gazing adoringly at me with her nose between my breasts.

When Enzo joined the family last spring, he was a cute little doofus with enormous feet.  When I’d come in the door, the girls would rush over to get their Paul Newman organic dog treats.  Enzo would wrestle his way to the front, excited and pleased but with no idea what was going on.

“Here I am!” he’d announce.  “I’m here!  I’m here!”  He’d look around, tail wagging joyfully.  “What am I here for?”

Enzo is still a puppy except he’s already taller than both girls and weighs close to 50 pounds.  He still comports himself like a puppy.  When he decides he has to do what Starfire is doing, he launches himself at me from across the room, wriggles all over me, licks every inch of exposed skin and chews my feet whether there are shoes on them or not.  I wish to point out that between Starfire and Enzo I often have nearly 100 pounds of dog on me. Starfire shoves him away and licks my face.

I generally come home from an evening at Chris and Dee’s fully moisturized.   My cats look pityingly at me, mouth “whore” to each other, and request doorman services.

Willow is my final conquest.  It’s my great goal, my Siberian Husky-type goal to so ingratiate myself with her that she will do for me what she does for Chris and Dee when they first walk in the door: bring me one of her stuffed toys.  The opossum is cute, but the lobster will do.  I’ll keep you posted on my progress.