These first days of the year have been very bad for me. A lifelong friend died, a friend from university days, from the beach on weekends, from soccer on the sand or on cement fields. The ratings of my program, inaugurating the annual season, have been disastrous, they have continued to fall, it no longer scores even one point, now it scores eight tenths. To make matters worse, I have had a fight with one of my brothers, the marathon runner, who has called me a brute and a liar, an accusation that I don’t know if I can scientifically refute.
I met my friend who has just died before turning sixty, a victim of devastating cancer, when we were barely twenty, at university, where he was studying industrial engineering and I was studying literature. He was serious about studying and even more serious about having fun. I naturally accompanied him in the second, not so much in the first. We had fun listening to music, smoking marijuana and playing soccer. We were having fun at the beach house of a friend we both adored and with whom, I suspect, we were secretly in love. We had fun driving around the city at night in her sports car in a hurry. He was not interested in gossip, insidiousness, or evil. He was basically a good man. He had a superior intelligence that made him fly above us, his friends, an intelligence that allowed him to excel as a producer and exporter of table grapes. You always remember your first kiss from him and, in my case, your first joint from him. I learned to smoke marijuana with him, to take drops to hide my red eyes with him, to enjoy music with him. He knew everything, but he flaunted nothing. He lived up, high up, in the clouds, where he now rests, laughing Chinese.
The death of that dear friend, which has been added to the death of a musician friend who died in the last days of last year, has reminded me that I must rewrite my will. In the last two years, after the pandemic, my sister died after being run over while riding a bicycle, the actor died falling from the fourteenth floor, the popular singer who was my dynamite partner on television shows died, the virtuoso musician died. weeks ago and now my friend from music, football and joints has died. I don’t want death to surprise me with an old, outdated will that reflects my previous will and not my most recent wishes. Nor do I want my mother to force my wife to bury me in the city where I was born, the city of dust and fog. It must be stated in a document legalized by a notary how my cremated remains will be thrown into the sea of this island and how my assets will be distributed among the women in my life, having myself been the main woman in my life, which allowed me to be a rich lady. and famous who is now plotting her farewell.
It has saddened me to read the ratings sheets for my television show these first days of the year. All the ratings of the Spanish and English channels in this country have gone down, as is known. Before, twenty-five years ago, the most powerful Spanish-language channels easily scored fifteen or twenty rating points, and now they barely reach five or six. I have been working for almost twenty years on a television channel that is rather small compared to those powerful channels. In good times, he scored three and even four points. Then the rating began to decline slowly and steadily. During the pandemic it rose briefly, which was without merit, since people were locked in their homes, prohibited from going out, watching more television than usual. After the pandemic, ratings continued to decline. Last year I struggled to score a point, a point and a half. The last days of last year I took a break and we broadcast repeated programs and the rating was one point on average. I expected that when this new year’s season opened with live programs, the rating would go up, but that was not the case, not only did it not go up, but it went down, so that the first week on the air, with fresh, unpublished programs , I have not been able to reach, not a single night, a rating point and I have scored tenths: nine tenths, eight tenths, seven tenths. That is to say, the repeats from December had more impact than the new programs from January. I can’t find a rational explanation for this phenomenon, unless the audience prefers to see me in a repeat because that allows them to hope that I have completely retired and will not bother them with live programs again. Once I go live again, the audience naturally gets depressed, sad, understands that I haven’t retired yet, that I will continue to be a nuisance, and then, furious, angry, they stop seeing me. So there are very few people who still want to see me on open television. One rating point is equivalent to twelve thousand homes. This past week I haven’t reached a point on a single night, so my average audience has been ten thousand households or less. It’s pathetic. It is humiliating. It is an unmistakable sign of my decline, of the channel’s decline, of the decline of Spanish-language television in this country. Because the programs that compete with me, and of course beat me, score just three, four, five points, no more. And that doesn’t make it any less painful to see that I can’t reach a rating point.
The certainty that my times of glory and splendor on television are behind me and now an ashy, gray, autumnal future awaits me, has led me to think, these first days of the year, that it is advisable to prepare a discreet and even stealthy retirement. of television, or the confirmation of that withdrawal, since it gives the impression that at least the public has already withdrawn from my program, so all that remains is for me to withdraw myself.
Given the bad start to this year, I would have preferred not to fight with my brother, but fate took a twist, ambushed us both and soured things. A week ago, while on vacation on a Mexican beach, I received an email from my brother, asking me if I could buy a cell phone and send it to my house on the island, where he would pick it up at the end of the month, since he was coming to run the race. marathon. I consulted with my wife, who approved of her favor, and I wrote back to my brother, telling him to send the cell phone to our house, that we would be happy to serve him. I didn’t measure the risks, I didn’t imagine the consequences, I didn’t know what mess or mess I was getting myself into. A few days later, back at my house on the island, I woke up as usual around one in the afternoon, happy and chubby to be myself, proud of cultivating laziness as a noble habit that allows me to survive, and I found that My wife, so many years younger than me, so many that she looks like my daughter, was furious, really angry, wanting to shout profanities at me and slap me. She had woken up at seven in the morning, had prepared breakfast for our daughter, had taken her to school and, upon returning, had received a message from the express mail company, notifying her that an urgent dispatch would arrive at our house. between nine and eleven in the morning. My wife had a gym class at nine in the morning, but, afraid that the postal company driver would arrive with my brother’s package and ring the doorbell loudly and the dog would bark and I would wake up shouting fires and hating the world, decided to cancel her gym class and wait for the package to arrive, since she had been told that it would only be delivered if she signed a paper when receiving it. My wife was then noble and generous, because she first canceled her gym class, and then went to the supermarket, and then cooked lunch, just to protect my sleep, to prevent the package delivery man from waking me up abruptly, and to sign a paper. at the time of receiving the box with my brother’s cell phone. However, the driver of the express mail company did not arrive at nine, nor at ten, nor at eleven, nor at noon. He arrived late and without apology at one in the afternoon. My wife had waited four hours, sitting on the steps outside the house, so that the delivery man wouldn’t ring the doorbell and wake me up. In other words, my brother and I, unintentionally, ruined my wife’s morning, and now she was furious with me for being docile, for being stupid, for meekly accepting the box that my brother decided to send to our house, spoiling one of her mornings. she. I had no choice but to ask my brother to please excuse himself from sending us more boxes, envelopes, packages and parcels, because the four-hour wait for his phone number, and the odious demand to sign a paper upon receiving it, caused a severe disturbance in family harmony. Unable to apologize to my wife for the inconvenience caused, my brother has called me a brute and a liar, and it is likely that he is right and that both adjectives fit well with the poor man I have ended up being.
I have started the year on the wrong foot, and I am not sure that the best is yet to come, and that is why I must write the new testament and prepare a decent retirement.
