Well, today I learned that I wake up early enough to catch the late night programming on Cinemax.
Picture this: It’s 5:30 on Monday morning. I have just stumbled downstairs and managed to start a pot of coffee. With my eyelids still heavy, I wander into the living room eating a banana, which in retrospect will feel like some painful, ironic foreshadowing. Sleepily, I find the remote and click on the television.
The audio begins just before the full image registers on the TV screen. I hear panting and some sort of yelping, and my tired brain wonders if this is that Sarah McLachlan infomercial about abandoned puppies. Just as I’m thinking I’m unprepared to see something so sad so early in the morning, a round orb comes into view, and I realize it’s a strange fruit…? Some sort of chicken pock? Oh, no! It’s a nipple!
A nipple? I think to myself, still in a sleepy daze. Why would there be…?
And then a man – err, part of a man – comes into view and begins to touch the nipple, and I drop my banana immediately.
PORN! IT IS PORN!
Quickly, I scramble to find a remote. Something! Anything to change the channel!
After picking up everything but the remote, I finally locate it and push buttons until I land on NBC. Then, I am standing in awe as the local news crew smiles back at me from the screen. They want to talk about the weather, but I can’t get that nipple out of my brain.
I spend the majority of the morning worrying about how the porn got on my TV in the first place, hypothesizing and mourning the fate of my two-month marriage, before Bryan calmly explains to me that channels like HBO and Cinemax have late night programming for specific audiences. I, having been recently named The Most Naive 30-Year-Old on the planet, had no idea.
All I wanted to do was watch Harry Potter last night. And in the morning, that magical and action-packed film had turned into something more groany and thrusty. My fragile mind was unprepared.
So unprepared.
Jillian Wyatt 