My TVs

The TV’s got the weirds again. Maybe it’s about to pass on to the great electronic beyond. We bought it 11 years ago, which might make it a Methuselah among televisions for all I know. Sometimes when we try to turn it on, it does nothing until I jiggle the power cord in back. Other times, it turns on but all you can see is a thin bright line running horizontally across the screen. Turning it on and off a few times fixes that, so far.

If a complete breakdown happens, of course it means that we’d have to run out and buy another box, which would go against my inclination of living without one for a few months or maybe, just maybe, for years. Throughout most of the 1980s, in college and especially after I moved into my first apartment by myself in 1985, I had no TV. Perhaps it was my way of decompressing after watching a lot of television in the ’70s. To this day most ’80s television does nothing for me, even good shows such as Cheers.

In Japan in 1990, I bought a small Goldstar brand box, made in Korea and the cheapest thing (about $200) I could find in the electronics store sidestreet in Osaka, which sported dozens of little shops all selling TVs and stereos and computers, jammed into a characteristically claustrophobic Japanese sidestreet. (Other merchandise cluster/sidestreets around town featured books, appliances, furniture and even one spot with a half-dozen restaurant supply stores that carried plastic models of food.) I sold the Goldstar TV when I left Japan, and bought our current one after returning to the States, making it only my second set. I’d be sorry to see it go, sorrier to have to pay for something new.