TINY LITTLE CELL PHONE POCKET

When I was considering what to write about for this week’s blog post, I had two possibilities: my looming birthday or my Atari 2600.

Looking ahead a month or so ago, it seemed natural to write about my birthday. Blogging is, by design, a narcissistic activity and listening (or reading) someone droning on about their own birthday seemed to be the epitome of that. And besides, I don’t think of myself as middle-aged, modern science being what it is, but that’s getting increasingly hard to deny. So, goddammit, I’ve earned the right to blog about it, or whatever.

So, that’s it then. The birthday blog.

Except…

A couple weeks ago, I was cleaning the office and saw my wife’s old, little TV, the one from the tiny apartment she had when we were dating. It sits there now, unused. The remote has disappeared. It’s not a flat screen. But, crucially, what it does have is the correct audio and video connections for the early-eighties technology of the Atari 2600 game console.

So, I plugged in the TV. Works! Then I pulled out the Atari and game cartridges salvaged from my parents’ house years ago. Would they work? Well, see for yourself:

It’s not a great picture, but the game on the screen is “Missile Command”, a fun little game about defending your cities from nuclear annihilation. Right out of the box, thirty-odd years since last I played, I scored 28,000 points.

So I was going to to write a post about this. About revisiting Frogger and Pac-Man and Pitfall. About the Joy of showing my kids these games I played when I was not much older than them. The five-year-old, in particular, was thrilled to find the “Superman” game. I was thrilled, and a little surprised, to find that out of a couple dozen cartridges, the only one that didn’t work anymore was “Donkey Kong”; a tragic loss, but only one causality is not too bad.

I could go on and on about his, but the idea of the birthday post still nagged. Which one should I write? Atari or birthday?

Then I noticed something else.

For the past couple weeks, I’ve been surrounding myself with things from my past: the Atari was first. I recently felt compelled to pull out of storage some old Star Trek and X-Files collectibles. The other night, I watched “Back to the Future”. Yesterday, I pulled out of the closet an old pea coat I really liked but hadn’t worn in ten years. Just because I felt like it.

These all seemed to be random exercises in recycling old junk. Then it hit me: could I be doing these things because it’s my birthday? Some sort of subconscious reconnection with youth as a defense against yet another turning of the calendar? Maybe. And it kind of works, I guess, with a little wishful fantasizing.

But here’s the thing. They say you can’t go home again. You also, it turns out, can’t completely return to your youth again. Here’s how I know:

That pea coat fits great and has an inside cell phone pocket with a Velcro flap to secure it. Nice, right? Only, the pocket is a little snug for the modern smartphones. Back when I wore this, everyone had smaller fliphones. Times change. Jackets don’t.

Nothing last forever. The Atari post and the birthday post are one in the same because past and present are linked. On paper (or pixels). But in life, the chain between past and present is there, but you can only move forward.

Man, I need a huge slice of cake. And a Jameson’s. Make it a double. On both.

Happy birthday to everyone with a birthday this year!

WHAT MAKES “THE TONIGHT SHOW” A THING?

Freud – with apologies to you Jungian enthusiasts – famously said that sometimes even a cigar is just a cigar.

Not sure that has anything to do with “The Tonight Show”, but I think maybe it does.

I used to love “The Tonight Show”. At least, I did back when it was “The Tonight Show”, which to me means when Johnny Carson hosted it. I was a kid then, and a college student when he retired. But I loved the show anyway. When I was little, my favorite thing was when I got to stay up late to see either “The Tonight Show” or “Twilight Zone” reruns. I didn’t fully understand either one, but I was captivated by then.

When Jay Leno took over “The Tonight Show” in the nineties, I was disappointed. He was okay, but he wasn’t Johnny. He wasn’t David Letterman either. By the time I was in college, Dave spoke to me more than Jay did and it bugged me Dave didn’t get the show. “The Tonight Show” was dead to me by then. What we were left with was “The Jay Leno Show”. But life goes on.

Flash forward twenty years. NBC decides to dump Jay and promote Conan O’Brien to the “Tonight Show” slot in an effort to keep him from bolting from the network and fighting to hold on to the coveted 18-34 demographic. Jay whines and gets a prime time show consolation prize. That show tanks and drags Conan’s fledgling new “Tonight Show” with it. It’s not long before Jay whines loudly enough that Conan is banished to basic cable and Jay is back in the “Tonight Show” host’s chair, doing the same lame jokes and lamer comedy bits.

It you couldn’t tell, I’m totally TeamCoco.

But it’s not over. Oh, no. Not by a long-shot.

Barely two years later, Jay v. Dave begat Jay v. Conan (See a pattern here for supposedly one of the nicest guys in showbiz?) which has begat (that’s a thing, right?) Jay v. Jimmy.

NBC has made it clear that come 2014, Jay is out as host of “The Tonight Show” and “Late Night” host Jimmy Fallon is in. AND, not only that, but the show will move from Los Angeles to New York, where Jimmy is now, and where “The Tonight Show” originated, until Johnny insisted on going to California in the sixties.

So, “The Tonight Show” obviously won’t be “The Jay Leno Show” anymore, but, by getting back to its roots will it be “The Tonight Show” again? Jimmy is a nice guy and can be kind of funny, but also often irritating. He shares a Midwestern deferential, nice guy quality with Johnny, but lacks Carson’s gravitas. They sold his ties and suits at Sears, back when Sears was cool, for god’s sake. I don’t predict Jimmy-wear in stores any time soon. Johnny was a classy guy. Jimmy is a goofball.

He’d never say it in public because in his own wise-guy way, Conan is pretty deferential too, but I have to think some part of Conan is laughing his ass off at all this. In fairness, it wasn’t Jay’s idea to give Conan his job and it wasn’t his idea to give Jimmy his job, but he’s been less than gracious in accepting either fate. Johnny never made a public-peep about his replacement when he left. Jay on the other hand, uses part of his show every night to take shots at his bosses.

Maybe Jimmy can bring a little of Johnny’s class back. But will it be “The Tonight Show”?

No, probably not. Thomas Wolfe said, “You can’t go home again whether or not you smoke Freud’s cigar while watching The Twilight Zone in New York.”

Seriously. It’s on Wikipedia. Look it up.

I still miss you Johnny.

TIME AND RELATIVE DIMENSIONS

You know how as the years go by, your weight can sort of gradually increase without you really even realizing it until suddenly you  discover you need to buy fat pants?

Life is kind of like that.

The first couple years I was in college, I went back to my old high school two or three times to visit a favorite teacher (I dedicated my first book In the St. Nick of Time to him). It was only six months to two years or so after I left that school as a student, but th place felt different. Familiar and foreign all at the same time. I didn’t recognize any of the students and they all seemed so young to the “grown up” college me.

At the end of my freshman year of college, my parents sold the family home and moved out of state. Several years later, they decided to move back to our hometown and, coincidentally, our old house was up for sale again. I arranged to come for a visit the weekend they were going to do a walk through, just so I could get a peek inside. It was REALLY weird.

I had lived in that house from age three until I went away to college. I KNEW this house inside and out, literally. The house I was walking through now as an adult was much the same. The same blue aluminum siding and black shutters. The same landscaping. The same old, ugly purple jungle gym in the backyard (Dad cemented the legs into the ground very well. That thing will outlast every other man-made structure in existence) Inside, except for an expanded master bedroom suite and a laundry room move from the basement to the second floor, the layout was pretty much the same.

But it was also all different. New paint, new furniture, new layout. The note I had taped on the inside of my bedroom closet above the door one of the last times I was in the house before it was sold was gone. I don’t remember what I wrote for my impromptu time capsule, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t, “Hey. Whoever finds this note I left, go ahead and destroy it.”

The house also felt bigger, somehow. That’s probably just because the previous (subsequent?) owners had already moved out and taken most of their stuff with them. The emptiness added to the feeling I had at the time that this was my house, but wasn’t. I described as being like if houses had siblings; look alike, but with different personalities. This was like a brother to my house, but not my house. My parents must have felt the same. They didn’t buy it back.

Around the same time, the city demolished my old elementary school and built a whole new school on the same lot. Same name, same spot, different building.  It creeped me out every time I drove by. It was like being caught in a parallel universe.

Elementary schools were on my mind recently (and really, finally, I’m getting to what inspired this blog post). I attended my daughter’s winter carnival at her school. For some reason, I was particularly noticing how small the place seemed. The classrooms, the furniture, everything. It’s logical, of course, and everyone knows that, but I couldn’t help think about my elementary school (the pre-demolition one). Was it that small too? Did it feel small when I was a student there? Does it just seem small because I’m an adult?

So what does all this tell us? That I think about weird shit? Probably. (My wife can attest.) But I think it also points to how a lot of the basics of reality – the passage of time, the distance and size and meaning of the objects around us – are subjective. The properties of the things we hold dear fluctuate as we move through life, both in time and space.

Not a revolutionary revelation probably. I just find it comforting to be reminded now and then what a dynamic, changing (evolving?) thing life is sometimes.