What if I don't wanna get rich? I just want to whittle...

In the era of 3 major broadcast channels my role, whether I chose to accept it or not, was to be the physical embodiment of my parents non-existent TV reomote.

If I wasn't blocking the TV, I was executing continuous channel request, volume adjustments and sometimes actually watching while simultaneously blocking the TV.

Anybody ever been told they "Can't see thru you"? ...ya, me neither.

In that oddly symbiotic way TV was very much a family thing.

Call it our interactive media of the day.

Our home life was wrapped around the tube ...and not surprisingly, that's what largely defined reality for us.

So that's how it happened.

We became the next generation of guided idiots.

We didn't question the artificial world it projected at us.

TV had no challengers.

All of the nostalgic cringy cliches became the foundational bricks in an adolecent childhood that still faintly streams in the back of my selectively unapologetic Gen X technicolor mind.

I was, to put it generously, emersed in an overwhelmingly melodramatic world populated with an abundance of silly charectors, portraying a reality that didn't resemble reality at all.

My parents, especially my Mom relives those old movies daily - westerns being her favorite, Gun Smoke particularly because, if I have the story right, as a young girl in Thailand she used to go to a neighbor's house to watch it on their TV? I'll have to ask if that's how it went.

On my Dad's side it was WWII movies and series like World at War that constantly played in the background ...to which I occasionally ask if he knows that we already won that one.

Krisada's Journal