Almost every day. I won't count the two-day 2004 ice storm or the occasional thunderstorm outage or the odd "service disruption" caused by a squirrel jumping into a bank of non-squirrel-proof equipment. I had cable for 21 years, and it worked. Dozens, scores, hundreds of channels.

It's a small thing, I know, in a world of terrorism and disease and war and poverty. A TV cable is nothing more than a little black bundle of wiring, piping in signals from satellites to entertain you, to help you pass the time, to sell you the complete works of Kenny Rogers. Mostly, it's just video wallpaper.

But when you tumble from 200 crystal-clear channels to six blurry ones, you go back in time. Back to a scary place. Back to when families watched TV based not on what they wanted to see, but what they could see best.

Nothing just happens out of the blue. My cable had been going weird for a long time. It would go out for a few hours when it rained hard. HBO would "freeze," as if the cable couldn't keep up with the signal. The Sopranos would dissolve into little digital bits in mid-curse. Freaky.

The cable finally died in September. I called Time Warner Cable. "No signal," the technician reported. "The cable line in this apartment is like 30 years old. Gotta be replaced."

The rest is a little hazy. Wait for more technicians to come by weeks later. Watch the technicians examine the way the cable line had been cleverly run up through the closet, the second-story ceiling, the high attic, some decades before. Listen to the technicians say there's no way they can get at the line to replace it - they're going to have to rig a new line, drill holes in the walls. Listen to the landlords say they're really, really against the idea of anyone drilling holes.

But the biggest problem with broadcast TV is that it has no memory. It lives only in the dumbed-down present. If you want to see TV's glorious past (and yeah, Three's Company was glorious compared with Fear Factor), you need to be in Cable World. About 66 percent of American households live there, according to the cable industry.

Everyone else is plugged in. Everyone else lives in Cable World. At the office, coworkers talk about something great they saw on cable last night. I glare at them like the Hunchback of Notre Dame glared at his tormentors. "I - DON'T - HAVE - CABLE - FOR - PITY'S - SAKE!"

I have cable back again. Larry King! I have cable back again. Maria Bartiromo! I have cable back again. Nancy Grace! I have cable back again. TNT!

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