A strange new world

All my years of practice, which resulted in a rare expertise, were history. I had worked and worked and reach a level of accomplishment few have attained. Suddenly, though, everything was new and I had no idea what I was doing.

I was baffled, confused, lost. They say it’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks. What about an old man?

After many years on my couch honing my considerable, some might say championship-level, channel-changing skills, suddenly I had a new type of television remote in my hand. The numeric buttons to this DirecTV remote were in completely different places from my old one. The command buttons were foreign to me. My fingers roamed aimlessly, not finding what they were seeking. My mind fretted, not getting what it wanted with the immediacy it had for so many years.

The remote was even different colors. A white and black remote? What kind of craziness is that? The remote also was a different, more-compact shape, too, God forbid. I had spent years with a certain cable television channel-changing weapon in my hand, and this little thing felt foreign in my palm. It just wasn’t right. It was, in fact, new.

Then there was the channel lineup. DirecTV’s lineup is tremendously different from the cable company’s. For example, A&E, one of my favorite channels, is on channel 265 on DirecTV. That’s just crazy. That is not where A&E belongs. Those of us who had cable know it’s supposed to be on channel 26. And CNN is on channel 202 on Direct TV. How is that supposed to make sense? CNN is supposed to be on channel 50, right? Anderson Cooper, where are you? Paging Don Lemon.

I was forced to abandon cable television for DirecTV, all because of a protracted dispute between the cable company and the company that owns the CBS and NBC affiliates serving this market, which has resulted in NBC and CBS disappearing from the cable lineup. I had vowed I would not miss the NCAA basketball tournament and I made the switch in time to catch most of the tourney games on CBS I deeply wanted to see.

There are other benefits to DirecTV. I get sports channels from all over the country. If I wanted to watch the Blue Jays play the Rangers — if I happened to be that desperate for entertainment — I might be able to do that, though which sports channels from around the country are blacked out at which times on DirecTV I’ve not been able to figure out yet. The other day I wanted to watch the Padres, but that was blacked out for some reason. I could have watched the Mariners at that time, although there hasn’t been much of interest coming out of Seattle for me since Pearl Jam.

My favorite new channel acquired with my DirecTV subscription is ShortsTV, which exclusively shows short films. I’d liked short films for a long time, but when I became a judge for the Imperial Valley Film Festival, which only accepts short films, I became an aficionado to the point of writing short films. The wonderful thing about short films is you often get the same amount of entertainment/messages in maybe a fifth of the time of a feature film. You can see such films all day every day on ShortsTV, and if I’m fortunate, you may see a short movie I wrote.

I’m slowly adjusting to the strange new remote and I’m starting to memorize the channels I favor. ShortsTV is channel 574. ESPN is 206. Fox Sports San Diego is 694 and Fox Sports West is 692.

Well well well, kiddies. Maybe this old man can learn new tricks.