Friday, July 08, 2011
to boldly go
Author's Note: I have delayed publishing this little rant for a couple of days because I wanted and thought I needed to say more. Upon much reflection and re-reading I have decided I have said enough. I rest my case.
__________
(While The Wife is as gorgeous as she is generous, caring, empathetic, and kind; there are somethings about her amazing husband that even after a decade together she just doesn't get. This late-night mild to moderately drunken rant is an attempt to explain. Or maybe because she is working an all-nighter for some extra cash, The Boy is snug asleep, and I just feel like rambling on a bit . . . )
Join me now my dear reader on a journey, as though we just used the gravitational pull from the Sun to accelerate our humble plastic starship to such a high rate of speed that we slingshot around our fair star and travel back through time. . .
High School.
In a moment of sad irony John Lennon is gone but Reagan survived an assassin's bullet and is in the latter half of his first term. We are deep in the heart of The Sprawl. It is a different world from the one in which we now reside. The internet as we now know it exists only as a vision in an about to be published William Gibson novel. Computers are just beginning to leave the realm of sci-fi and scientists. If you were lucky you got to play with an Apple II in school.
DVDs? Nope, not yet. The Beta/VHS war is beginning to rage. As we are in an affluent suburb, most of the homes had one or the other machines. But there was not yet a Blockbuster on the corner in the local strip mall to provide content to watch on the new marvelous invention.
Hundreds of digital TV channels on demand? Nope. Pink was Bob Geldof, not a spunky tatted-up pop star. When he sang "thirteen channels of shit on the TV to chose from" you were jealous because had like five more than you did. Really. Cable TV had not yet expanded to The Sprawl.
A gallon of gas and a pack of Marlboros both cost around fifty cents. You'd buy one of each. With the other of the two dollars your dad gave you each day to buy lunch in the high school cafeteria you'd buy a Big Gulp and a bag of Skittles at 7-Eleven on your off-campus lunch break. If it was a lucky day, a friend supplemented your soda from a Jif jar filled with a collage of booze stolen from a parent's liquor cabinet. You'd giggly sit as quietly as possible in English class that afternoon, holding your breath whenever the teacher drew near.
Any change that was left was plunked into the Spy Hunter machine in the nook where the ATM machine now sits.
It was a different place and a different time, but sadly, yes very sadly indeed, not all that different from the Planos and Round Rocks of the world that still vapidly exist.
It was like a John Hughes movie, but before John Hughes fully defined and described it for us and posterity. If it was like a John Hughes movie, we imagined ourselves as Judd Nelson and envied Emilio Estevez. We lusted after both Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy although both were out of our league because we were the Anthony Michael Halls.
So what did you do? What did we do?
We watched Star Trek. Because we were the Anthony Michael Halls. We watched episodes recorded from syndication on our new VCRs. Over and over and over again, until they were engrained and we could recite them line by line from memory. We watched Star Trek and talked about music like Rush, U2, Pink Floyd, The Who. We watched Star Trek and we drank dad's Natural Lite beer and smoked his Merit cigarettes. He was a cool dad and didn't really care so long as we left him a couple of each. We watched Star Trek and imagined that we were Kirk and that new girl from the other high school just hired at the grocery store or burger joint where we worked was the bikini-clad green chick.
Star Trek's utopian egalitarian vision of the future stood in stark contrast to the consumer caste system suburban society that surrounded us. It was an escape that helped to soothe the unattractive truth. And that was (and remains) precisely its appeal.
Period. The end.
|
__________
(While The Wife is as gorgeous as she is generous, caring, empathetic, and kind; there are somethings about her amazing husband that even after a decade together she just doesn't get. This late-night mild to moderately drunken rant is an attempt to explain. Or maybe because she is working an all-nighter for some extra cash, The Boy is snug asleep, and I just feel like rambling on a bit . . . )
Join me now my dear reader on a journey, as though we just used the gravitational pull from the Sun to accelerate our humble plastic starship to such a high rate of speed that we slingshot around our fair star and travel back through time. . .
High School.
In a moment of sad irony John Lennon is gone but Reagan survived an assassin's bullet and is in the latter half of his first term. We are deep in the heart of The Sprawl. It is a different world from the one in which we now reside. The internet as we now know it exists only as a vision in an about to be published William Gibson novel. Computers are just beginning to leave the realm of sci-fi and scientists. If you were lucky you got to play with an Apple II in school.
DVDs? Nope, not yet. The Beta/VHS war is beginning to rage. As we are in an affluent suburb, most of the homes had one or the other machines. But there was not yet a Blockbuster on the corner in the local strip mall to provide content to watch on the new marvelous invention.
Hundreds of digital TV channels on demand? Nope. Pink was Bob Geldof, not a spunky tatted-up pop star. When he sang "thirteen channels of shit on the TV to chose from" you were jealous because had like five more than you did. Really. Cable TV had not yet expanded to The Sprawl.
A gallon of gas and a pack of Marlboros both cost around fifty cents. You'd buy one of each. With the other of the two dollars your dad gave you each day to buy lunch in the high school cafeteria you'd buy a Big Gulp and a bag of Skittles at 7-Eleven on your off-campus lunch break. If it was a lucky day, a friend supplemented your soda from a Jif jar filled with a collage of booze stolen from a parent's liquor cabinet. You'd giggly sit as quietly as possible in English class that afternoon, holding your breath whenever the teacher drew near.
Any change that was left was plunked into the Spy Hunter machine in the nook where the ATM machine now sits.
It was a different place and a different time, but sadly, yes very sadly indeed, not all that different from the Planos and Round Rocks of the world that still vapidly exist.
It was like a John Hughes movie, but before John Hughes fully defined and described it for us and posterity. If it was like a John Hughes movie, we imagined ourselves as Judd Nelson and envied Emilio Estevez. We lusted after both Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy although both were out of our league because we were the Anthony Michael Halls.
So what did you do? What did we do?
We watched Star Trek. Because we were the Anthony Michael Halls. We watched episodes recorded from syndication on our new VCRs. Over and over and over again, until they were engrained and we could recite them line by line from memory. We watched Star Trek and talked about music like Rush, U2, Pink Floyd, The Who. We watched Star Trek and we drank dad's Natural Lite beer and smoked his Merit cigarettes. He was a cool dad and didn't really care so long as we left him a couple of each. We watched Star Trek and imagined that we were Kirk and that new girl from the other high school just hired at the grocery store or burger joint where we worked was the bikini-clad green chick.
Star Trek's utopian egalitarian vision of the future stood in stark contrast to the consumer caste system suburban society that surrounded us. It was an escape that helped to soothe the unattractive truth. And that was (and remains) precisely its appeal.
Period. The end.
|
Comments:
Post a Comment
