Television sucks. Yeah, I know that's something that mortals have been saying since the omnipresent cathode-ray tube invaded their households a half century ago. Well, I'm here to tell you that you were wrong back then. Television was innocent, benign and yes, amusing. If Ward and June could see it today, they'd run screaming into that long good night and never let their children near it.

Flipping through the dial at 3 am, I've learned that no one living in a trailer park possesses a full set of teeth, knows who fathered their children or doesn't have a 12 yr. old who dresses like a hooker; that I can have firmer abs in just 30 days simply by sitting on a beach ball AND clear up my acne for just three easy payments of $29.99, or my money will be cheerfully refunded.

Sure, I could tivo my ass off, but to what avail? Reality television isn't just putting writers out of work, it's also striking the death knell for public assess television. Any idiot with a handy-cam can find his way to primetime these days. Or so it seems to me. And who am I? Better to ask what am I? I am a vampire. An eternal denizen of that endless night. And let me tell you, it's been made all the more endless by the dreck served up to the masses on a regular basis.

Before you go running to call the caretakers of the rubber room, let me explain to you that we're all around you. Hell, society couldn't get along without us. Forget Count Dracula, we're the guy pumping your gas at 1 am, the waitress serving your coffee after the bars empty out, the nurse in the emergency room that hold your guts together after they've been spread out across the highway. Talk about the last group to come out of the closet, we're it! And we have more in common than you would think. We're just like you. We get up, we go to work and when we come home we want to kick back and watch television. I'm not talking Masterpiece Theater here, just something that doesn't lower your IQ by a tenth of a point for every minute you watch it. Give me Perry Mason, Gunsmoke, I Love Lucy and keep your MTV!

We don't spend our free time plotting ways to seduce the odd virgin. Who could find one anyway? Nor do we hang out at raves, dress in black and spend about as much time as you do lamenting the state of the world. What we do DO, is watch television. Lots of it. In the small hours of the night. Let's face it, what else do we have to do, surf the internet?