I Will Never Forgive Rob Lowe

I am dying to get rid of my landline and DirecTV.

My dad is in an ALF. I am moving him to a better ALF next week. My dad, Fox News, and Turner Classic Movies are the only reasons I have TV service at all.

Having DirecTV is like having stinging sores all over your body. The receiver is molasses-slow. The vast majority of channels are sales and pay-per-view channels. If you want to buy Dr. Ho’s magic back belt or a Dr. Oz chakra-stimulation girdle, DirecTV will be of great help to you. If you want to watch actual TV programming, it’s nearly as useless as not having a TV.

I got my dad some kind of premium movie package because he was complaining. I have never been able to watch a premium channel. When you try to select HBO or any other premium channel, you get a message offering to charge you a fee to watch. I don’t know if my dad ever managed to watch a premium channel, but the complaining went away for some reason, so I decided not to look into it.

DirecTV has several Ultra 4K channels. When you land on one, the receiver locks you there. You can’t flip to a new channel. It tells you to ask for 4K information, which you don’t actually receive when you click the virtual button. You have to bang on random remote buttons until you escape the channel. Imagine how much I have enjoyed helping my dad get free, over and over. His TV won’t play Ultra 4K, and DirecTV won’t provide it anyway, but there is no way to block the Ultra 4K channels to keep my dad out of trouble.

My latest connectivity bill was $263, for basic channels, the torment I have described above, 1.5 MBPs Internet, and a landline I only got to make my dad happy.

Why haven’t I killed my TV and phone service? You must wonder.

My dad is not yet installed in the new ALF. I don’t want to cancel everything and then find out there is some kind of problem that will keep him at home for another week or month. Life with a dementia patient and no TV service is unthinkable.

I would also like to dump my Internet provider and get fixed wireless. It would be much, much faster than my current provider. Right now, the fee is supposedly about $90 per month, so I figure that means the real price is $150 per month (local taxes, state taxes, federal taxes, free-TV-for-strangers-who-don’t-want-to-work fee, environmental damage fee, oxygen surcharge, male gender penalty, white privilege fine, transgender amercement, anti-bullying assessment…). That’s expensive but doable, but the problem is the stingy data allotment. They give you 20GB for $90 nominal. I figure I would blow through that in a week. Who, in his right mind, would pay three figures for a week’s worth of data?

I never, ever watch network TV. I don’t know how to watch the local news; I believe people here watch the Orlando channels. I don’t watch sports. I do not want nudie channels like HBO. I should really quit watching Turner Classic Movies. I have burned through the best of their inventory already. Youtube is much better. I can go to Youtube and get Christianity, tool videos, gun videos, math, physics, electronics, and all sorts of other useful things.

Basically, I’m paying three figures for two channels, and to be really honest, I don’t actually watch Fox News. I feel like I should have it available, but I suppose that’s stupid. I should cut it loose. So three figures for one channel.

There are services for people who occcasionally want to see something other than the Internet. Youtube has an enhanced version. There are outfits called Sling and Hulu. I already have a Vudu account, which is useful for movies. I can’t get resolution better than 720, but I started out in life with a 19″ black-and-white TV with four channels, so 720 looks great to me.

I’m glad I’ve seen so many old movies over the last year or so. It reminds me that America used to be a better place. Please don’t get on my back about racist laws, lead paint, bell bottoms, slow cars, the 55 mph speed limit, and all the other problems we used to have. I am aware we had very serious problems. I’m just saying the people were far superior to the current crop.

It has been nice to see G-rated movies featuring men who wore ties and women who wore dresses, and I have enjoyed getting familiar with classics I had overlooked, but TCM only has so many good movies. Once you run through them, you start sifting through the dregs. I may have to start watching musicals soon. I cannot stand musicals. I thought I could, but I was wrong. I think The Wizard of Oz is the only movie musical I’ve ever enjoyed. The other day I watched some musical or other, and I kept fast-forwarding through the songs. Apart from that one movie, Judy Garland is unbearable. She always looked like her corset was about to burst, and they put so much makeup on her to repair the self-inflicted damage, she resembled a Romulan. I guess her bleak, dissipated lifestyle was always on the verge of killing her.

I don’t know which service to get. Maybe I shouldn’t get a service. I have Amazon Prime (The Grand Tour’s third season is even better than pre-Clarkson-punchup Top Gear), I have Youtube, and I should be able to get by with one or two hours’ worth of video per day anyway.

I tried Netflix a few years back. It was horrible. They somehow managed to avoid buying every good movie made in the last 20 years.

I may do a Sling free trial. PC Magazine says it’s the best for cord-cutters, and free is free. If I can just remember to end it before they start charging me…

You know how that works. It takes two mouse clicks to sign up. Then when you cancel, you have to dial an 800 number, wait on hold for two days, and then speak to a hostile CSR in Bangladesh.

I can’t wait to get my dad moved permanently so I can cancel this tripe. I’ll start out with an Internet connection and nothing else, and we’ll see where it goes from there. I don’t think I need a streaming service.

Whenever I get rid of anything that reminds me of my dad, it makes me sad. There are still two containers of his ice cream in the freezer. I know that if I throw it out, I’m acknowledging that he’ll never come home again. I have been hoping to bring him home for visits, but I have learned that this can be destructive. You bring them home, they think they’re moving in for good, and then you have to take them back to their institutions. They’re happier if you leave them where they are.

I have to throw out his bed and give away his furniture. If I do that and then move into his bedroom, I’ll be saying, “He is never coming back.” If I leave his bed alone, I can tell myself he’ll need it when he visits. There is no other bedroom on the first floor, so there is nowhere else he can stay. Throwing that bed out will be a very final step.

He still has clothes here. Since 2017, I have been throwing clothes out. He’s a natural hoarder, so his closet was so full the clothes were pressed against each other. You had to pry them apart to hang things up. I would guess he had 150 pounds of clothing, dating back 40 years. At the ALF, he has slacks and guayaberas, plus a sweater he doesn’t wear. Nothing else. I kept a few other things here because I told myself he might wear them, but he won’t. I thought I should keep a suit for his funeral, but he chose cremation. There will be no viewing. He won’t even need to be dressed up.

I have to throw the remaining useless clothing out. This week.

It shouldn’t take 5 years to for a person’s mind to die. Taking 5 years to die from a purely physical disease isn’t as bad. Everyone adjusts, preparations are made, and then it’s over. The patient is still with you the whole time. With dementia, it’s like living with a ghost or a replica. The patient is mostly dead, but the body walks around your house, reminding you of him without giving you real access to him. Imagine how you would feel if your mother died from cancer and then got up the next day and sat at the breakfast table, talking nonsense.

My phone was set to remind me to give him his pills every morning. Today it reminded me at 9 a.m., as always, and I went to Google calendar and deleted all future events. I will never see that alert again. From now on, until he dies, other people will give him his pills. I used to be sort of glad he was getting painkillers, because it meant I could always set a few aside in case I had an accident or a kidney stone. I didn’t do that before I put him in the ALF, so if anything happens, I’m on my own! I should have grabbed a few, but I thought I had time.

Everyone should have a bottle of Percocet or Vicodin on hand, drug nannies and their meddling notwithstanding. When you have real pain, the last thing you need is to sit in a waiting room for three hours without drugs.

I am eager to have my life back, but it’s still hard to be decisive about it.

Okay, I just made a plan. Get Dad installed, cancel the landline and DirecTV, and see how it goes. After that, I can make little adjustments.

Then I can decide if I want to move farther north.