#277

When I was a kid, we had a magic, moving-picture box called a television. It wasn't thin. It was fat. It was big with big parts that warmed and hummed and blasted me with hungry, arcing static whenever I touched it. To turn it on, I had to touch it. To change the channel, also. To turn down deafening white noise or turn up campy dialogue and singing. And the dust. There was a static-held, ever-present layer of dust on the TV. Thick dust. It snapped, crackled, and shocked the shit out of me every time I ran a finger through it. It was impossible not to run a finger through it. I did it often and now have many tics. I don't believe television hurt my vision, though. I knew it was better to stab myself in the eye than sit too close to a TV. Every adult said so and I believed them. A few years later I heard something similar about eyesight and masturbation. I was 20/20 until I was a teenager. Anyway, moving on. The television picture was grainy and fickle, and tended to scramble if the weather was bad (a perfect time for TV), or something good was on, or the antennas were unskillfully pointed, bent, or broken. Every adult was an antenna expert with wire hangers and Reynolds Wrap. As furniture, TVs were a focal point, a centerpiece, and this demanded design. Makers like Zenith tried wood finishes, ornamental edges, and so on. None of it worked. Neither did the buttons and dials. Or rather, some were useful, some were functional, but few were both. Many times, I saw televisions without color. No kidding. Think of black-and-white photography, but blurry, and always Western-themed. Movies were at theaters, not on TV. Except for "The Wizard of Oz." There were three networks that went by similar, three-letter names. Now they remind me of the Jackson 5, peacocks, and stupid amounts of CSI. Today, of course, other channels and services for the same thing (television content) exist by the thousands. ESPN and MTV launched when I was a kid. To my generation, this has the gravity of, "I was a kid when Kennedy was shot." And then it faded. Not the television picture, that was always crappy. I mean the golden age; it ended. Remote controls, for example, appeared and with them a deluge of unfunny jokes in every Father's Day and birthday card for dads. But there was a time when TV was a kind of awkward adolescent, and we loved it.