Under the Covers and Overwrought (with apologies to Dante)

      
I am here to warn you:  if you are having trouble sleeping, do not turn on late-night television.

I repeat: DO NOT TURN ON LATE-NIGHT TV.  You will be transported to hell and will spend the night circling all nine rings.  You will wish you had pulled your left kidney out through your navel with a fork instead of picking up the remote.  The heat you generate will not be from tossing and turning.  It will be the actual flames of hell. I have the burns to prove it.

When we were young, our parents warned us that nothing good happens after dark.  I will add an adult corollary:  There is nothing good on TV after 12:30 AM. As a matter of fact, the FTC should require an automatic warning beginning at that hour:  “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. The anguished screams you hear will be your own.”

Once you turn on late-night TV you will be tormented by commercials for identity protection services. Don’t bother changing channels.  The same ads will be on every station. These infomercials will remind you how right now, at this very moment, bad guys are stealing the deed to your home and trading national secrets with foreign despots using your passport.  What else?  These monsters may even be stealing your butt prints as you lay on your sheets, prints they will use in some future diabolical scheme to pretend that they are you as they back out of a lead vault with a briefcase full of nuclear codes. And do not stare, because the bad guys may take an iris scan as you watch…

By the time these infomercials are through with you, you will have visited all nine rings of hell, and you will be regretting your life.  All of it.  You will regret not accepting Jesus Christ as your personal savior, having pre-marital sex, helping yourself to seconds at Thanksgiving dinner every year, squandering precious allowance money on  baseball cards when you were 10, screaming at that scam caller who tried to get your Medicare number, refusing to buy a flower from the Hare Krishnas at the airport in 1965, voting for a questionable politician one too many times, and being a rude host at that professional convention back in 1990 when the hall was packed and the air conditioner broke down. No Minotaur will need to eat your flesh.  You will have bitten your nails to the quick.

This nighttime experience will add to your daytime hypervigilance.  You will be reminded that scammers are stealing your voice by calling you on your phone and waiting for you to say “Hello,” and that your image has been stolen from your g-mail profile picture and now your head is on dozens of indecent photos that are going viral on some dangerous porn site where they are sure to ruin your future except now you don’t have one. The pervasiveness of these identity threats will haunt you and rob you of your faith in humanity and in your higher power.  Will there be anything left of your identity to show at the Pearly Gates?  You wonder:  “What if someone already took my spot?”  It’s possible.  Let’s face it--Santa has already been scammed by identity thieves.  We all know some very naughty people who have gotten some mighty fine presents.  Now I understand why.

If you unwittingly do turn on late-night television some sleepless night, I strongly suggest that you do not open your email the next morning because you can be sure another ring of fire awaits you due to the internet’s Lucifer having heard of your vulnerability by spying on your smart TV.  An automatic subscription renewal notice will be waiting.  It  could be for some add-on to the identity theft package you purchased in your middle-of-the-night-panic or one of those “free trials” and “one-time purchases” you made because you believed them when they said “free” and did not see the fine print that said what they really meant by “free” was “you will be billed forever.”

No matter how desperate you feel the morning after, don’t think you can call the authorities to report this violent mind-rape.  It will be deemed your own darn fault for being up in the middle of the night and inviting these strangers into your home by turning on the TV.  And weren’t you already in bed?  In your pajamas?  Well, then, you were just asking for it.  And forget a morning-after pill to calm your frazzled nerves.  They have disappeared from the shelves because, after all, two wrongs don’t make a right.  Unfortunately, you will not be able to leave the country because your passport has been compromised and no country wants stinking American immigrants with guns in every pocket--especially illegal ones without a passport.

If your mind is already overwrought and the anguished screams you hear are your own, then late-night TV is not for you.  For your own sake, ask someone who loves you:  “Please!  Hide the remote.”