There is a black hole in the corner of the living room where the television once lived... Our television blew up, well not so much blew up as well went sort of silently screen blacked into that good night in the middle of the afternoon. It raged not at all, it just sort of stopped working in the middle of an episode of Roseanne. And what of this expression BLEW UP anyway? I have heard it four thousand and thirty times over the course of the last six and one half years, but nothing here has ever actually BLOWN UP. There has never been shrapnel or collateral damage caused by any of these things that have allegedly BLOWN UP. The hair dryer did not bring down thirteen day laborers waiting on Main Street. The air conditioner did not take out a family of five on their way to weekly worship. The car did not destroy a falafel stand, deserted cell phone store and a dry goods stall. Yet all of these things have BLOWN UP this year. For the sake of the innocents and the not so innocent, but not really deserving to die in this way, I think we should retire the term BLOWN UP and use another term to invoke and describe the failure of our household appliances, perhaps shit the bed works acceptably or even crapped out, croaked or even gave up the ghost. So anyway, our television blew up yesterday. I mean it shit the bed, crapped out, croaked and gave up the ghost. Since it is August, things are bound to break around here. I hate this god damned month. Come on September 1! Anyway our television shit the bed and we decided after a contentious debate to never replace it, to go forward in this world like the Amish, to turn off the tubes and straws that are silently removing our brains from our skulls while we sit wide eyed eating junk food, to turn our backs on the media that wants us to know about everything or at least know about all the things that we should be scared of and what we should buy to counteract the fears they have instilled, to raise a barn, to husband livestock, to make really great pies, cheese baked goods and pickled produce in clear hermetically sealed Mason jars. OK, wait a minute I went too far, forget the pickles and the livestock and the pies and the barn, we’re just not going to buy a new television and see what happens. Can man still live on books and conversation and quiet music played on an old guitar alone? Or are we so saturated with media, so addicted to fear, so worried that we will miss something, that we absolutely must go out and buy another television before boredom sets its fat ass in square our laps one fine, sultry Friday night and the police are summoned because we are rolling around on the front lawn in our underwear, screaming, scratching and clawing at each other. Besides, we have a long list of things that will be accomplished in the now empty hours that once found us in front of the television sedated and pliant: assemble, edit and publish a full length book of my poetry, install the replacement basement windows that have been sitting in said basement for seven one half years, insulate the heating pipes that radiate money out the drafty basement windows, scrape and paint the house, patina is cool, my house is neglected, eat oysters, a lot of oysters and then make love thirteen times in one day, finally make and try pesto sauce, clean out our closets and dressers, make an appointment for pickup of the fourteen piles of clothing resulting from said cleaning, use the new mandolin I bought to make french fries and gratin of potatoes and cool ridged slices of cucumber for my next salad, start an online used book business, update my website which has not seen a new poem since May, finally assemble my free poetry chapbook, Poetry Slut, in process since 2005, sit quietly in my back yard with a beer and not worry about the score of the god damned New York Yankee game I am missing. Well, we lasted two days. Our new television functions supremely and I fell for the five year extended service agreement. On two counts of being an idiot, how do you plead? Guilty and guilty your honor.