I’m a big fan of wretched excess.
Seriously now, I own a 60 gigabyte iPod. Who needs 60 gigs of
music? The only thing anyone ever needs 60 gigs for is porn, and
that might not even be enough. That’s without mentioning my
habit of buying things in bulk. One frozen chimichanga?
Borrrrrrring. A crate? Very nice, I like!
So when my roommate brought his TV when he moved in this summer,
it was clear what needed to be done. I already had a TV, and his
was better than mine, so I did the only thing that made sense.
I put it next to the old one so that I had two TVs. Duh.
This allows me to play video games, talk on AIM, and watch
something like “30 Minute Meals with Rachael Ray” all
at the same time. It also makes people look at me like I’m
Mark Foley at a Republican Party function.
Watching multiple TVs at one time was a godsend. Now I could
finally live out my dream of having my life resemble the opening
monologue of “Network” (except that instead of
newscasters, the multiple TVs would be showing all the Kallissa
Miller MTV dating shows at one time).
And then, like it does to bank accounts and innocent drunken
love, Las Vegas ruined everything.
I went to Vegas this weekend for some friends’ 21st
birthdays. I’ll spare you most of the details because I think
that 21st birthdays in Vegas are more predictable than, well, an
episode of “Parental Control” (these trips can be
described by the equation “21 + Alcohol + Gambling + Lack of
Social Conventions + 24-hour Del Taco = LOLz”).
My buddy Aaron and I decided to spend all day Saturday at
Caesars Palace Race and Sports Book watching the Tigers-Yankees
game, the Dodgers-Mets game and the UCLA-Arizona football game.
Aaron said we would be able to watch many games at the same
time.
He wasn’t kidding. Upon walking into the Sports Book and
seeing seven massive television screens, each the size of a Buick,
my jaw hit the floor and only came up when I realized how
disgusting the carpet was.
I’m not going to lie, I honestly couldn’t handle so
many things thrown at me at one time. One second I’d be
watching Jeremy Bonderman embarrass Alex Rodriguez, then the crowd
would scream after a Texas touchdown, followed by groaning in
response to a horse race (or maybe in response to the dance Aaron
did when UCLA covered the spread; things got fuzzy about halfway
through the UCLA game when I started seeing multiple Chris
Markeys).
I know that the likely response is that I should have just
picked one thing to watch, but that’s the problem: I wanted
to watch all of these things.
I never thought I’d say this, but it’s actually
possible for too much to be on television. There are so many days
where we flip through channels and complain that nothing is on. And
really, if I had been flipping through the channels, the baseball
games and the UCLA game would have been the only things that
interested me.
Yet they were all right in front of me at the same time.
Suddenly I just had to watch horse racing because it was there, but
I also had to watch a hockey game (I was definitely in the wrong
state of mind to be able to follow the puck, not that I ever can
anyway).
It’s the same mind-set that leads people with high-speed
Internet connections to download everything they can, and leads to
dares such as the one I made to a friend that he couldn’t
download all 43 Bob Dylan albums within 48 hours. He got to 21
before realizing he didn’t even like Bob Dylan. Yet because
it’s there, we must have it.
Eventually, everything ran together in such a grotesque fashion
that I swear there was a play in the UCLA game where Patrick Cowan
hit a pop fly that was caught by Marty Turco, who turned a double
play with a horse while a jockey rode a dazed Jason Giambi around
on the ice.
All in all, it was a weekend of excess. I already knew it was
possible to have too much of a good thing, and I think my
experience at Caesars Palace can add TV to that list.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go take an
aspirin while I throw one of my TVs out the window.
Well … maybe.
Humphrey says you can blame the quality of this column on
Robin Hood and his merry band of thieves at the Excalibur blackjack
tables. E-mail him at mhumphrey@media.ucla.edu.