I gave my television to a friend the other day because his is on the blink.

He didn't have another big one, but he did have a little one he was using. But his wife told me they were having trouble re-reading the questions on "Who wants to be a millionaire." While I don't know much about the show, having such a travesty befall friends of mine was not setting well with me. I told them they could borrow my television set.

It is one of those big 1980s wood-grained monsters, 25 inches or so of screen and four feet of wood panels serving no purpose whatsoever. It still has the factory twisty knobs and everything. I am sure it is quite a step down from their remote-controlled, picture in a picture, programmable, super-micro chipped, high-resolution television. However, mine does have the advantage of still working at this point.

Once I had delivered the set, with my friend's help, I visited for awhile and decided to go on back home and get some rest. I have mentioned several times how much I detest television, so I didn't really think I would miss it at all. That first night, I actually forgot all about it until I walked through the living room to go to the bathroom and noticed a big open spot where it used to sit, a spot that now had several cobwebs decorating it and discarded VCR tapes filling in the void. That's were it was, I thought.

The next morning when I got out of bed, I went to flip on the television to get the weather and noticed it was gone. Although I was more or less sleepwalking, I remembered I had loaned it out before I did something dumb like call "the laws," as my brother-in-law, who knows them "professionally," says from time to time. Thinking about "the laws" and laughing, I turned on the police scanner for the weather. The only problem with that is the voices are all really annoying - boring and monotonous, pouring out gibberish about the foothills, Piedmont and northern mountains (which I assume means us). I finally just turned it off before I even got the weather. You would think a job like that might require a decent voice. Oh, well. I can't run the world, but I surely can fuss about it.

That evening, I came in and changed clothes and took off with some friends. When I came home, I started to flip on the tube to check out the 11 o'clock news and noticed again that I no longer have a TV. That's when I started thinking about all the people who really like television. I wonder what would happen to them if the TV was suddenly jerked from their life like pulling the carpet from beneath their feet?

I bet a lot of people would have withdrawals. Can you imagine? I don't even like the darn things and I missed mine twice in two days. I started using the radio more, but I have noticed that the weather on the radio is hard to find for all the commercials and I don't know when or where the news will be on. But at least I like the "programs" between the commercials better. I have found that I usually miss the weather when it finally does come on.

Next, I decided to utilize the Internet for weather, but I found that I didn't really want to go through all the trouble to log on just to check the weather and every time I was checking my email, I forgot to look. I tried a local daily paper, but I watched it for four days and it was wrong every day. It was probably right for one of those bigger cities, but I don't live there. I live here.

Why do I really need to know what the weather is going to be anyhow? I told a few friends that I got rid of the tube and they looked at me like I was a little off, or "touched" as one friend put it, in the head. "What do you do if you don't watch TV?" He asked me while we were taking a break from tuning up his car.

"I like to read," I responded. "I like to take long walks alone and sometimes I like to talk to friends. I work outside when I can and I fish and hunt and work on cars. I play my guitar, even if I am only singing to myself. I go to my job and I go to bed."

"If you ain't touched, you sure have been reached for," my friend told me with a big laugh and a shoulder slap.

"Is that like saying, "I can feel for you but I just can't reach you,"? I joked, adding in a little ribbing, "It'll be alright, so long as we can still find things to talk about and with a mouth like yours, we'll have no trouble."

We both laughed and went on back out to his car and started changing out the spark plugs and wires, one at a time so that we didn't get confused and mess up the whole firing order, just like my daddy showed me. You know, now that I think about it, he didn't like TV very much either.

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