Home Quotations Photo Gallery Art Gallery Poetry Links Product About Contact The DEVIL BOX and the FORK It started with boredom. Our parents banished television from our home when I was 8 years old. Yeah, no, really. For 10 years I had no TV in my childhood. A large chunk of my peer group's shared memories will forever hold them in a flimsy common bond that I can never share. A lot of shitty sit-coms and some good "news" reporting is missing from my history. On the playground, I heard the fragmented recounting of the humorous and serious doings. Always, I was the outsider, the curiosity, the excluded during those exchanges. And I yearned for that TV! The parents heard voices. Angelic choruses. God, yes herm (or sheem), found these two fascinating, so personal chats occurred. That is what I was lead to believe and I played along since I was powerless to affect any change. One voice said the TV was Satan's haunt and must go. So, if I recall correctly, the TV was given to friends. Now I assume those were pagan or heathen friends. I probably have that wrong, though, cash must have been involved. We moved. From the small town of my birth to the big city. From hicksville to cosmopolitan, sophisticated, suburbia. All the neighbors were natives and up to the minute about the local mores. I spoke "funny". My words were the same, but my dialect brought smiles, laughter and derision. I was live TV! I made friends with natives and they taught me the proper way to say words such as flower and bag and aunt. We did things outside our homes and connected as humans. TV, though, was a large part of their vocabulary and I could not study that homework. I begged God's servants to relent. Constantly my pleading fell on deaf ears. Our home would have no Devil box. In hope of a loophole, I visited friends before their favorite programs were aired and made a point to wait for them. Less than a handful of attempts were successful. My parents had phoned the other parents and passed instructions from God. There was to be no TV for me. Friends' families would politely cast me out at 7 in the evening. Books, I read books to fill the hours. I read books until the clocks would shift from their slow, tedious, tick-tock to a purr or hum. In those moments of delusion I would put down the books and marvel at the passage of time. Warping and flowing, roaring in my ears. I would slowly leave the house, creeping rather than walking. With baby steps outside to wonder how I had sped up while others moved at the pace of glaciers. Their words stretched out to odd lengths. Expressions frozen on their faces as they nearly seemed motionless. The spell would break after a few or several minutes and I would return to my reading. Then God told Mother I should not read more than I enjoy creation. Banished books were returned to library shelves and outside mischief beckoned. On the off-season, when TV offered reruns, friends would join my post dusk fun. The river. The park. The school. A neighbors house. I found ways to amuse my monkey self. Destructive ways as I lashed out at any available target. I jumped fences, found chain-link holes, climbed buildings and pranked neighbors in their sleep. On a rerun night I was being a bad influence on Perry. Perry had strict parents, but He had TV. Perry had an angry and abusive father, but He had TV. He doubted my story of creepy-crawling the neighbors. Across from Perry lived a special family. By vocation the father made the family special. He taught at the junior high school. He was an authority figure and Perry dared me to bring him proof that I could creepy-crawl that house. I slipped over the fence and opened the back door to enter the kitchen. In those days the windows had a security flaw that allowed you to unlock them from the outside. I took a piece of flat-ware from the rack by the sink and I watched TV over the family's shoulders. They sat together on their sofa, content with the content streaming from the box. I was watching TV! And in that purple-glow moment I was already too far down the road to delinquency to return to television's warm, dull, bosom of banality. I left before the commercial break. I gifted the fork to Perry and left him as He gaped at me from his lawn. We both knew, at that point, I was outside the social order. I did not know where the path was leading but I wanted excitement in my future. Perry was happy to return to his TV. We drifted apart as friends, became neighbors nodding over the fence. I believe that fork left Perry with an uneasy, threatened feeling. I saw pity in his eyes before that night. He may have doubted the information that I gave regarding my life and thoughts and abilities but the fork seemed to confirm it all. After that fork passed to his hands his face wore less pity and more a mask of civil indifference. I think that fork left Perry with the opinion that an algebra teacher articulated to me years later. He said, "My heart bleeds for you. You are going to jail." I nodded. "You are going to prison." I nodded. "You are going to Hell!" I smiled. "Don't you care?", He queried. "I'm tough, I can take it.", I replied. Tears welled in His eyes as he dismissed me from his desk. Outside His world-view, I smiled through the rest of His class. I couldn't hear God and didn't care. - Stark R.M. - June 18, 2005 * * * Home Quotations Photo Gallery Art Gallery Poetry Links Product About Contact © SpiritCaller.net, 2005