When I moved into my new place, one of my cousins offered me one of his old TVs. I was like, “I’ll take it!” because it’s a really nice TV, much nicer than my old TV, that big boxy set. I remember when I bought it probably like fifteen years ago, I thought it was so cool, it was bigger than anything that I had owned before, it had a built-in VCR. But nobody uses VCRs anymore, and you walk into a house with an old boxy TV, well, it makes everything look a little dated.

“I’ll take it!” I said that again when one of my friends offered me another old TV. I say old, again, I really mean older. Older than his brand new TV which, Jesus, it’s so thin that, from a distance, from like across the room, you can’t even tell where the wallpaper ends and where the TV begins. Well, you can tell when it’s on, you can see the line around the TV. But I mean, think three dimensionally, it’s like this thing is a part of the wall.

Don’t get me wrong, his old TV is nice, the one he gave me, it’s really nice. It’s a flat screen, it’s big. Like I said, it’s much better than anything I was watching before. Did I mention my old TV? How the red, yellow, and white cables were on the front of the set? Who designed it that way? It’s like, if I wanted to hook up my XBOX, first, I had to buy a converter, because this thing didn’t support HDTV, and then I had to run the cables all the way to the front, they were just dangling there, totally in the way.

This new TV, my friend’s old TV, it was pretty thin, I mean, you could totally see it from the other side of the room, maybe it was even a little heavy, like, when I told you about my friend’s new TV being indistinguishable from the surface of the wall, this one, it was like people would say, “How is that thing hanging on the wall? It looks way too heavy to be held up by … by what? What’s supporting that thing? Did you use a stud finder? Because I’d be worried about that thing crashing down, taking a chunk out of the drywall.”

It’s not brand new, no, but it’s still a nice TV. People can have TVs that look five years old. But I couldn’t help myself, that’s why I said, “Yes, I’ll take it!” when I saw this ad on craigslist, under the “free” section, for a “moderately used” fifty-six inch plasma. Now that’s what I’m talking about. Again, a clear border, definitely some heft to it, but fifty-six inches? That’s much bigger than anything that I was watching before. I figure, any issues that I might run into with it looking old, slightly used, whatever, it’s all overshadowed by how big this thing is.

But three TVs? I’ll admit, it’s a little much. I don’t have three bedrooms, I don’t even have three rooms period. Only one cable box. And that free TV from the Internet, I guess I should have plugged it in and hooked it up to something before I went out and bought that stud finder, that huge metal brace that I nailed to the wall to support those fifty-six inches. It works, yes, but everything’s just green and red. I can’t figure it out. What happens to a TV where it can only show things in green and red?

And I was all worried about my place looking old with one old big TV, well, nothing makes a place look more cluttered than having three TVs sort of hanging haphazardly at random spots throughout the house. I look like I’m running some side-of-the-road electronics shop. I took one down, but the hardware made such a mess of the drywall, like you could clearly tell that a TV had been hanging there. And I’m supposed to paint the wall now? Patch up those holes? I could have just bought a new TV, a brand new flat screen TV. They’re not that expensive. Or the first one, the one my cousin gave me. That should have been fine. I couldn’t resist though, someone says to me, “Hey man, you want a free …” and I’m just like, “I’ll take it! Send it over! I’ll take it!”