BEEN THINKIN’ ABOUT… TELEVISIONS FOREVER. The florescent light was bright in the old store, all cheap wood paneling and thin green carpet. The Friday evening was chilly and damp and I, following my parents, tread lightly, threading my way past aging television sets in various stages of disrepair. The shopkeeper was talking about TVs, naturally, and I was doing my best not to step on any cords or spare parts.

I certainly didn’t realize it at the time but I had walked into a moment soon out of time, a television repair store, a strange threshold land between age-old craftsmanship — like a cobbler’s shop — and space age technology. Televisions used to be expensive. Televisions used to be heavy. There was once an era before planned obsolescence, an era when things were presumed to last. Did we buy a television from the man in the old store? I believe so, although I was only five at the time and so am not quite sure. But I do remember the new TV itself, a massive thing with beautiful faux-wood and a remote control.

Remote controls were nearly brand new; my grandpa and grandma had gotten their big TV with a remote control just the year before. We were all astounded by the technology. Grandpa liked to stay in his big rocking chair and turn up the nightly news as loud as it could go. The talking heads from Des Moines could be heard all the way out in the breezeway, even the garage, even outdoors. Grandpa liked his television loud.

My mom hated television, distrusting the way ideas could be beamed directly into our heads at a moment’s notice. She also took issue with the violence and sex that was being beamed into my head with whatever show my dad happened to fall asleep in front of. Arguments ensued. My dad wanted to relax with his beer, never tuning in too much to any particular idea unless it was related to aeronautical engineering. “Once Josh gets something in his head, it won’t leave,” said my mom, referring to me as a boy. She was right about that observation. Compromise meant the new TV with the fancy remote went downstairs, into a basement where my dad could fall asleep in front of whatever programming he wanted. I — and my overactive head — stayed safely upstairs.

Boys will be boys, though, and I still managed to find reasons to go downstairs, still managed to watch what my dad fell asleep in front of, including — but not limited to — Die Hard, Terminator, Bladerunner, Predator, and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. In Bladerunner there is that strange, gritty electro-punk motif undergirded by the assumption that things still get repaired, that shopkeepers still exist, even within all that foggy electronic dystopia. How little we anticipated a world in which every item instead became disposable. Ink jet printers? Cheaper to buy a new printer than to buy replacement ink cartridges. Television sets? They wear out fast and there is no cobbler-esque repair shop in sight. Just throw the thing away and buy a new one. Nothing lasts because nothing is supposed to. Nobody of consequence bothered to ask the lasting questions. For the working class poor, “disposable everything” hit hard. “Cheaper” doesn’t mean much if you cannot afford to buy a replacement every other year. What lessons were being taught without words?

Anything — products, ideas, people — all are disposable given the right time and place. It was a big shiny tomorrow with a lot of promise, as long as you weren’t the thing getting thrown away, washed down Orwell’s memory hole.

Back in the old store, we packed up an RCA VideoDisc player as a weekend rental, along with two movies: Star Wars (back when there were only two Star Wars films and the other was The Empire Strikes Back) and a film set in Africa with Katharine Hepburn wearing a long white dress. The TV repair man was still talking, explaining how the VideoDisc player worked. He was a heavy man with a big belly. His curly thinning hair and thick mustache made me think of the villain sidekick in Disney’s The Rescuers. The man’s tightly stretched polo shirt was tan, strangely the same color as the shop’s florescent atmosphere, an atmosphere of inky dark edges creeping just beyond the mind’s eye. It was as though the place itself knew its time was up. The end of the era and its corresponding losses, while unimaginable, would remain unseen, felt only by the omission, felt only later.

My mom was right, of course, as moms often are. The television was a strange and powerful tool for beaming ideas directly into our minds. The cobbler-esque television shop would close its doors not long after, replaced by department stores and electronics stores and big box stores and then Amazon. Disposability would become the biggest scam in town. And we would, on some deep level, begin to really long for a firm foundation along those ever-shifting pop culture shores, reaching out to touch the solid ground of what little true craftsmanship remained.

— Joshua Heston, editor-in-chief, StateoftheOzarks

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