the vcr

I almost burnt the building I lived in once,  It was a converted hotel on LaSalle by Division full of tiny apartments, and in the dead of winter it just did not put out enough heat,  Since gas and electric was included in the rent I turned on the burners of the stove.  I was pretty careful about it, I turned them off before I went to bed and before I left the house, except one time I didn't.  Well I wasn't sure.  I got one block from my building and I thought did I turn off those burners?  Oh sure I did, well maybe I didn't, no I did, yeah I remember distinctly now twisting the dial, or was that yesterday?  Well even if I'm sure, what I really ought to do is go back and check, but doesn't that lead to OCD?  If I give in to that won't I be constantly going back to check every day, maybe twice a day, how will I ever get anything done?

So I pushed on ahead and I never gave it a second's thought until I got home and smelled smoke.  Shit.  Fourteen stories, maybe twenty apartments on each floor, 280 apartments. all those people homeless now, maybe some dead, maybe I should just keep walking until I got to the airport and start on a new life and a new identity on some tropical island.  The closer I got the stronger the smell of smoke, but at some point it became weaker  It turns out that there was a gas explosion and resultant fire in the Grand Avenue Little Italy about a mile west of me.  It was not my fault at all.

That's a groovy phone Old Dog.  I haven't seen the videos of kids with dial phones but I remember years ago one of my buddies was giving a kid a ride in his car, and when the kid learned that he could raise or lower the window just by turning that knob and the kid was like how cool.


I remember sitting around in front of the radio listening to shows before we got the tv, and years later I remember listening to old shows (including Beagles's beloved The Lone Ranger) rebroadcasted and I liked them fine, but it's just that it feels so odd to be listening to something and just staring into space.  Now that I am early to bed and to rise, I spend the last couple hours of my day watching trashy tv like the murder channel and NatGeo, maybe I should just tune into some radio show.  Strangely enough I bet I could find them on youtube.


The next new invention I am thinking of is kind of an odd one, the VCR.  I think it was that guy who first got the answering machine who got one, and tongues wagged.  They were pretty expensive at the time and we were all like nonmaterialistic ex-hippies, so who the hell did he think he was? 

Then they got cheaper, and then I got a job at the post office making what for me was really big bucks, but it was the night shift and when I got home there was nothing to watch, so I bought one.  It was all the rage at the PO, talking about what tv shows we were taping that night as we tossed the package that was supposed to go to Florida into the Montana bag.

There was a whole sort of temporal stability to tv back then, with the sign in in the morning and the signout at night.  The regular newscasts with no 24/7 breaking news, the three o'clock movie, the ten o'clock movie.  I'd like to think it gave us stability, but looking back we weren't all that stable then.