Learning TV all over again

Next month I celebrate the first anniversary of the single-greatest accomplishment of my marriage—and no, I’m not talking about the fact that I managed to keep my absurdly enormous 1970s-era stereo speakers, although that was a coup.

Thanks to fiendish sleight of hand, those mahogany behemoths occupy hallowed space, 10 glorious feet apart along the back wall of my garage. The “stereo center,” although besmirched by oil stains, is larger than every apartment I ever lived in as a single guy. My big college speakers are hooked up to an old receiver that thumps out funk and jazz and just makes tedious outside projects enjoyable.

As sweet as it was, sidestepping their garage-sale fate was only my second-greatest accomplishment as a husband. The greatest?

Last summer I convinced my wife we needed to upgrade to digital cable.

Why is that a big deal? I married an English teacher who believes reading is one of the most valuable uses of a person’s free time, and that television is, for the most part, a fruitless vortex that sucks the life out of idle minds. To which I respond, “But what are the negatives?”

She’s even uttered preposterous statements such as, “We shouldn’t even have a TV.”

Yet here I sit, not only a subscriber to digital TV, but the proud owner of a digital video recorder. Or, as I like to call it, the hallowed appliance that forever altered the course of my personal entertainment odyssey.

Point of procedure. I’ve been writing this column at my kitchen table where I’ve just foolishly disclosed to the lovely Martha that she is, in fact, featured prominently herein. She did not smile.

“You can tell the readers that you forgot to record Lost (when we relied on our old VCR) more than once, and I think you did it on purpose,” she said to tell you. “And you can also tell the readers that Lost has literary merit as a full body of work.”

(I can also tell you she’s fond of The Biggest Loser, Sex and the City and every VH1 ’80s retrospective ever aired, but hey, who am I to judge? I’ll watch two hours of late-night television and not be able to remember a thing I’ve seen.)

For me, digital TV simply means watching unlimited soccer, a sport for which I remain irrationally enthusiastic. Soccer now flows into my home like endless, sweet artesian spring water.

But I have had to adapt and learn a thing or two about our DVR.

Don’t ever delete Lost, for one.

And if you miss the debut of a surprisingly good series, you can play catch-up by easily recording all the reruns. Or, you can set it to record every soccer game.

Yet I keep underestimating its raw power, so Martha has to remind me. Like, if I zone out during a two-minute infomercial for a flimsy, retractable awning during halftime of Liverpool versus Havant & Waterlooville. She’ll ask, “Why are you watching commercials? Just fast-forward.”

Oh, yeah, that’s right!

This thing just keeps getting better and better.