destiny or dying

Fact: I don't own a TV. We don't have one on purpose. It's not due to some asinine religious boycott. There's several reasons we don't have one.

1) I use to work for a local NBC affiliate as a master control operator. And when you spend 3 years of your life getting paid to watch 40 hours of network programming a week, it makes you never want to own a TV again. For the rest of your life. Ever. Kind of like people who work at Long John Silver's never want to eat fish again.

2) I got tired of always wanting stuff. And I discovered that by not having a TV, my personal materialistic desires lessened dramatically. If you never see TV ads, you never know what's out there. Thus, you never want stuff.

3) In marriage, I discovered that I pay more attention to the people around me when there's no TV. That's a good thing. But now I have to re-learn discipline with this damned computer...

But all of this is thrown out the window when I visit Obi-Wan's house. I figure watching TV at his place must be OK since it's his and I don't live there. His TV is on maybe 40% of the time anyway.

Obi-Wan's is where I fell in love with Criminal Minds on CBS. It's probably a lousy show by most people's standards. But it fuels my fascination of the agent investigative and psychoanalytical world, I love those characters, and I'm a sucker for a predictable crime plot.

Through some mishap turned blessing, Obi-Wan recently got rid of his cable TV and now uses rabbit ear antennas. This means he now gets the religious channel TBN, which was never on cable for some reason. And TBN comes in the clearest so he usually watches it the most.

I've never paid attention to religious programming. My parents never watched it when I was growing up. And I sure as hell didn't watch it in college.

TBN seems to have many different preacher-type shows, all of which seems to follow a charismatic/pentecostal or non-denominational vein.

And so far, every one of these shows I've seen has one primary message: financial prosperity. Or maybe just prosperity in general, but an emphasis on one's money is usually hinted at.

Surprisingly, I don't have an aversion to money. I like money OK. You can do things with it. Like feed and house your family, travel to see distant relatives, use it as seed to generate an income, give it away to those without, and maybe buy one of those cool Warwick fretless 5-string basses.

But seriously...I find it a great irony to sit in Obi-Wan's dilapidated house, on 35-year old worn out furniture, watching a preacher on a small TV talk more about prosperity than waiting.

More about receiving than giving.

More about destiny of self than dying to self.