TV — or Not TV? That is The Question.

It’s not like I’m the only person in the country who doesn’t own a TV. I have friends, curiously, all involved in the arts, for whom you can search every room in their homes and not find a single tele. I haven’t owned a television set in a decade and it’s not that I’ve taken some holy oath and I’m a Benedictine monk, disguised as a satirist, eschewing worldly pleasures, like Ovaltine and media.

I watch videos and movies on my giant computer. Probably too many videos and movies on my giant computer. Of course, a fellow these days must keep up on current events on YouTube and how many feral hogs in Oklahoma can be shot with the new sniper night vision scope or how Michele Obama looks in a bikini.

(At this point in the column, I’m just going to stand here in my surgical mask, cowboy boots and underwear, pretending I’m listening to elevator music and whistling while I wait for my editor, Tim Whyte, to search his top drawer for five or six horse-size nitroglycerin pills before rummaging through the next sentence for some libelous and inappropriate comment about the former First Lady, the legendary Pacific Northwest Abominable Snowman and moustaches. Actually, it’s a literary ruse. There AREN’T ANY upcoming subscription-ending comparisons, metaphors, similes or innuendos. Tim lives.)

Where was I? I had High-Speed Business Internet installed in my office. They had a special and for a few bucks extra a month, I could get High-Speed Business Television Reception even though I don’t own a TV set. That was 10 months ago. Ten. Months. Collecting dust are a long, lonely white cable and a TV clicker, connected to, like my brain, nothing.

Lately, I’ve been haunted by the serious joneses to buy a high-definition flat screen TV the size of a certain former First Lady’s hips. In a TV set? That’s — as our beloved and soon-tobe-re-elected President Trump would say — “HUGE…!!”

My problem?

There’s nothing I want to watch on television. Not interested in Cher or Alec Baldwin taking out their teeth and saying bad things about America. Not into Overweight Jersey Shore Women Yelling At Their One-Brain-Celled Boyfriends With The Foppish Manbuns.

Dear Mr. Santa Clarita Valley:

Surely there must be something else you can write about besides ridiculing manbuns and the men who wear them bouncing so jocularly atop their heads so.

Support SCV Commerce. Go buy the damn TV. Then you can watch reruns of “Grand Ol’ Opry” and “Bonanza” and drool about the way things used to be when all was but dirt.

Many things have changed and a certain male demographic is not afraid to experiment with bold new identity classifications. I, for one, have had to suffer the heartbreak of trying, several times, to grow a manbun, only to have failed. It’s Hate Speech like yours that discourages manbuns from exhibiting the courage to flower completely.

A little compassion, please.

Your servant

Cameron Smyth, 13,

Mayor of SClarita & All The Ships At Sea.

Our goodly mayor Cammykins has a point. According to statistics, there are exactly 3.318 trillion TV shows on. Like, right now. There’s nothing I really want to watch. I can’t watch the news. Fourteen seconds into the network lie-fests, I’m a quarter-inch away from the screen, my head tilted at an impossible angle, screaming at the big-haired braindead newscasters.

I was looking forward to the upcoming NFL season, both to see how My Patriots and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers with Tom Brady and Gronkowski will be doing. The NFL? Makes me sick. Sports used to be a friend and sanctuary. In the worst of times, you could forget yourself in the calming sound effects of some steroid-rich wealthy mutant trying to physically remove head and helmet from a representative of a hated land, like Oakland or New York City. There was the nap-inducing boredom of beer, potato chips and Major League Baseball. I could revel in the skill level of the NBA, without some multi-millionaire oppressed victim trying to shame me because my cousin 29 times removed via marriage took a potshot at a distant grand aunt in the Crimea War and now I somehow owe him money.

I don’t watch soaps. The Home Shopping Network. Or “Whores Of Alaska.” Used to watch “Finding Bigfoot” until I realized it should be retitled as “Finding Mule Deer.”

Can’t stand “Naked and Afraid” because it’s not really what you call “naked” when they blur the naughty parts. In these gender-questionable climes, let the record reflect, “Female Naughty Parts.” Won’t watch “Dancing With The Stars” because now, stretching to the horizon, stars make me puke. Can’t even watch Fox News. Every time I turn on the channel, they’re yelling at me: “Look What Those Despicable Liberals Did Again Just 8 Seconds Ago!!!”

Hey.

Fox News?

Take a sec and walk off the air-conditioned sound stage. Make a fist. Punch “Those People” in the nose and jump up and down on them with golf shoes. The old-fashioned kind with the logger-tree-climbing spikes. Don’t yell at me while I’m eating a submarine sandwich with my feet up. Practice what you preach. GO DO SOMETHING BESIDES TWEET.

This entire concept of having a screen the size of Bolivia with nothing as enticing as a fish tank might just drive me to doing the unthinkable.

I just might go and buy a book.

And, horrors of horrors, I just might make a lovely cup of tea and read it.

John Boston is a local writer with 119 major awards and, as of press time, no TV set.