Losing All His Buttons

I was lounging in bed one recent evening, blazing laps around the 63 channels on my new television set like Rick Mears flying around the track at Indy, when suddenly my trusty remote ran out of gas. It stopped dead on Channel 51 and one of those torturous Dave Del Dotto get-rich-quick infomercials.

Maniacally, I pounded the buttons on my sleek TV pal, but Dave’s too-tanned face would not go away. I banged the remote on my head, rubbed a little saliva on the infra-red end. Aimed. And Dave introduced some average Joe who’d made millions too.

“Who broke the remote?” I yelled to no one in particular, since I’m the zapoholic who runs the thing into the ground. But aren’t these gadgets built for people like me? People who demand a new image every time they blink their eyes? People who watch no show in particular, but everything at once?

MTV, VH1, BET, C-SPAN, E!, talk, news, business, “Rin Tin Tin K9 Cop,” Michael Landon reruns, Spanish and Korean and Jewish TV, dating games, Texas thunder, Steve Guttenberg movies, home shopping, the mating rituals of weird mammals, old “Saturday Night Lives,” a New Age guru extolling the wonders of enemas, Mets game, White Sox game, Braves game, Angels game, Dodgers game, ESPN game, a World Series classic on Prime Ticket. . . .

OK, so I ride the thing a little hard. But surely they test these suckers at some TV torture track--with robots pounding each button for thousands of hours in Arabian heat and Arctic blizzards. Surely they hand the slim plastic rectangle to a rambunctious chimp and have him fling it around like they do with mere pieces of luggage. Remotes can’t just break down like some used Fiat.

It must be the batteries. I dug some fresh AAs out of a drawer. Aimed. Dave’s floral lei still wilted in the Hawaiian sun. I traversed the 10 feet to the TV, shut it off and went out for a walk.

I walked straight to Alpha Beta to buy batteries--the kind with the power tester on the package. I returned home and loaded them in. I aimed.

It wasn’t the batteries.

They don’t usually fix remotes, my TV dealer told me. They just send out a new one. How long, I asked. Oh, three, maybe four weeks. I grimaced as if my cable had gone out. Hang on, he comforted. He rifled through about 50 remotes in a box behind the counter. My spirits soared. But he didn’t have any that matched mine.

It’s been two weeks now and I can barely watch TV. It’s just no fun anymore.

I have two college degrees. I once could sit still long enough to read Proust, Tolstoy and the Bible, both old and new. When I was a teen-ager, I sat rapt through eight entire nights of “Roots.” I even watched the commercials.

Today my TV attention span maxes out at about 3 1/2 seconds.

MTV, they say, is to blame. The quick-cut editing of music videos ushered in a whole new definition of the term “attention span.” But even MTV is too slow for me. I watch Axl Rose lip-syncing for more than two seconds and bam: Bring on Dave Del Dotto.

I know I am not alone. Teens and adults, men and women of all ages do it too--an entire nation zapping from “iddle East peace ta” . . . “incredible deal on Plym” . . . “cubic zirconium is yours”. . . “ ‘Like a Virg” . . . “Seattle 6, Oak. . . .”

For us, television today has nothing to do with what comes out of the box itself. It is all about squeezing the trigger on that bulletless gun. We zap like mad to forget the little humiliations we suffer every day at work or on the freeways. We blast away at our TVs, killing show after show, releasing a day’s worth of aggression. It beats shooting the boss or the neighbor’s dog.

We are also zapping to escape the numbing monotony that most of TV offers. We believe that if we flip fast enough, somewhere in that 63-channel cacophony of light and sound we’ll find something that will amaze or enthrall us.

But now it seems to me that just the opposite is true. With more and more channels showing murders, explosions and war both real and imagined, nothing is special anymore. After you see LAPD officers beat Rodney King several dozen times, even that ceases to shock. These days it takes nothing short of a Kirk Gibson miracle homer to awaken us TV zombies. I watch seven games at once because it increases the odds of catching that home run. But as seven games worth of foul balls blur into another wasted night, each game has been rendered meaningless. I tried watching one baseball game without the remote. Darryl Strawberry was at the plate, runners in scoring position. After waiting through a bunch of pick-off attempts, visits to the mound and foul tips, I finally decided it’d be more fun to vacuum my room.

Since my remote control died, my house has never been cleaner. I’ve never been in such good shape, never written so many letters to my far-flung pals, never gotten along so well with my girlfriend. I’m just about finished with “Crime and Punishment.”

I’m giddy with happiness, with the exhilarating breadth of life’s possibilities, with. . . . Wait a sec. Someone’s at the door.

Please let it be UPS with my new remote.