There's something in the air tonight.
I'm in bed now. Teen Titans is playing on the TV. Carrie is soundly asleep beside me. She's been in bed for several hours now; she has to get up by 4:00 in the morning in order to get to the airport to catch her flight.
Most all of the windows in the house are open, and I can hear the window fans drawing the cool air inside. It's air from a day that saw some sporadic rain, and there's something about the cool temperature and a slight whiff of some smell combined with the whirring of the fans that takes me straight back to a time ten or eleven years ago.
I was a college boy, though I was staying at my folks' place during summer break. I didn't have a job. I didn't do anything that required any amount of money, really. So I would stay up late at night. Very late. Everybody else in the house would be in bed by 1:35 at the latest (when Late Night with Conan O'Brien got over), but I would continue on for several more hours.
I liked having the run of the downstairs all to myself in the middle of the summer nights. The sliding glass door to the back would be open, the sliding screen door would be shut, and one of those big, white, square fans would be set up so that it would draw in the air, the air that was cooled by the lake just a few feet from the backdoor. And off to the left I would be able to hear the distinctive sound of the fountain in that lake.
I actually had an excuse for staying up so late, though it was sketchy at best. At 5:00 or 5:30 Transformers would air on the fledgling Sci-Fi Channel, and I would stay up to make sure the VCR recorded it correctly onto a video tape, many long years before it would become easily available on DVD.
These were the days when the Cartoon Network and Sci-Fi Channel were still getting their toes wet in the cable waters, waters which were themselves still a little unsure and sketchy. These were the days when TNT showed The Rudy & Go-Go World Famous Cartoon Show, and the Sci-Fi Channel would show a random assortment of cartoons in the wee hours of the morning. Shows like Bionic 6, Midnight Patrol: Adventures in the Dream Zone, Captain Scarlet, Snorks, and Transformers.
I would stay up all those hours through all those cartoons, enjoying my nocturnality. Often I would make a Monterey Jack cheese quesadilla in a frying pan with butter, and eat it with barbecue sauce. I would play on the brand-newish computer in the corner of the dining room. I would sit on the couch and marvel at the quality of cartoons from the 80s, and wonder why anyone would ever find Gerry Anderson's supermarionation shows to be anything other than interminably dull.
Then, when Transformers came on and I hit record on the VCR, I would climb upstairs and crawl into the top bunk in the room I shared with my brother (yes, we had bunk beds, but only after I started going to college, curl up in my Batman: The Animated Series sheets, and sleep until around 1:00 in the afternoon.
There was nothing to do that summer but hang out, play video games, watch TV, and do Fools Play. And think that that new girl who tried out for Fools Play was awfully cute...
This was also the summer that Susan and I would play Mario Kart 64 for at least one hour every day. But that, as Mako would say, is another story...
This is Chris dot com
Monday, June 04, 2007
Nostalgia Detour
posted by Christopher at 11:35 PM 
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