Watching Television After Not Having Watched Television for Three Months

(Reading Time: 2 minutes, 15 seconds)

The NBA on ABC, Playoffs, Denver v. Phoenix, 6/11/21:

I find myself looking forward to the commercials—the music, the images, the breathless voice-overs, the stupidly vapid fun everyone seems to be having with their beer and fast food while talking on their cell-phones and signing up for the special once-in-a-lifetime offer from a cell-phone service provider. The over-arching theme: that we’re now free from COVID and can now go to new blockbuster movies, drink two beers instead of one (Heineken: ‘Now We Can Have Two’), slip into some new Levi’s jeans, the ones with Social Awareness  (‘Buy Better, Wear Longer’), and purchase a car big enough to hold 3-large nuclear families, plus dogs, that can go anywhere, even to the remotest part of Alaska, to mount a melting glacier with its 590 horse-power engine.What doesn’t make the cut? The poor thing being dragged along the Pacific Coast the Caribbean where it can die a slowly happy death while sipping a dry martini and eating The Bourbon Bacon Cheeseburger from Wendy’s.

The commercials are fantastic, much better than the NBA game, better even than the Half-Time Report, though I’d forgotten, having not watched television for a long time, that almost all advertising is designed to make you dislike the product enough to remember it.

The theme over-arching the over-arching theme: consume, consume, consume, there’s never been a better time to consume AND, we deserve it!

Recent pictorial work made without television /and/or FCC approval, part of an on-going Walmart Series, abstractions and representational art pieces made exclusively from products purchased at Walmart, Cody, Wyoming.