RIP CRT

With a recent purchase the final CRT in a long line of lovable television sets takes its place beside my record player, Walkman and Commodore 64 in the dustbin of discarded devices. With it, so passes another piece of my youth. In the distorted reflection of it’s dusty screen sits a wide eyed farm town boy currently winning a staring contest with the single blinking eye of a bygone era. Locked in “Saturday Morning Cartoon Mode” his senses are wired for input, all channels are open, and a steady stream of the seemingly senseless sensory saccharine flows directly to his spongy sub-cortex. With it moves the implicit source code of a lifetime of trivial pursuits. The fertilizer of minutia. The Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code of a dizzyingly daunting database of distractions.

Nerfs and Smurfs, Lego’s and Play-D’oh’s.
Star Wars Transformers GI Joe Voltron.
Pac Man Donkey Kong Space Invaders Q’Bert
Rubix Cube Simon Stratego Battleship
Incredible Hulk Silver Spoons Dukes of Hazard Love Boat
That’s Incredible Battle of the Network Stars
Misfits of Science Street Hawk Automan
Magnum PI Fall Guy Riptide Remington Steele
Moonlighting Knight Rider After School Specials
Weird Science Ghostbusters Breakfast Club Bueller
Freddy Jason Michael Pinhead Candyman

All cataloged, indexed and readily accessible for just the right moment of referential quick draw and while a lifetime accumulating frivolous facts may seem poorly spent, I argue that the residue of these recollections were at the very foundation of my future.
The face in the reflection now is decidedly more weathered. Gray beard, bald head, deeper eyes behind which churns a comically outmoded processor still running B.A.S.I.C. with 64 k of Randomly Accessible Memory. As the ghost truck of my youth hauls the Cathoid Ray dinosaur silently away, bedraggled cord trailing in the breeze, I can almost here the signature static snap-hiss of the TV set turning off for the last time.

…and this concludes our broadcast day.