Lately I’ve had these telltale signs that I must be
getting old. I intellectually know
that at 29 I am arguably young.
You are as young as you feel.
I didn’t feel old when at breakfast the bartender didn’t even card
me. I didn’t feel old when at
Macy’s some random woman offered me eye cream. It was strange being that I was in the Home-Furnishings
section but I went with it. I
didn’t feel old when my mother told me that I was too old to be a young
parent. None of that fazed
me. I did however feel old when a
20-year old asked me “What’s a scrambled channel?”
I officially realized that I, like the elastic on
Mariah Carey's clothing officially am old.
I explained that a scrambled channel was that magic
place between channels. If you
didn’t have HBO or Scinimax this was what you lived for. I realized that this kid didn’t know
the pain, excitement and exhilaration of trying to watch scrambled-soft-core
porn. Looking at a scrambled channel was like looking at one of those
Magic Eye pictures from the 90s.
Where your friends asked if you saw the image beneath the image. You would stay no every time, then just
lie and say you saw it just to get them off of your back. This kid didn’t know what it was like
for us to find porn before the Internet.
You had to have a friend, sister or National Geographic. It was hard. This kid never knew the thrill of arguing with a buddy if
that was a mole or a tit. He just didn’t know. He looked at me like I was speaking alien. I explained
how we as children in the cable-age became masters of our domains when our
parents weren't looking. He didn’t know about how it became a talent to
switch channels fast and slow enough to see a remnant of a scrambled tit just
because we could. We ALL did it. At least those of use without that
relative who had that illegal cable box. The trick was to not get caught.
This was a primitive time right before the Internet became our peephole
into the universe.
I realized that this kid didn’t know that there was
a time when life was harder. Where
we didn’t download music. We
joined these CD clubs. We would
get 10-15 CDs in the mail without any intention of ever joining or paying. It was a different time!
This kid didn’t know that there was a time in
our recent past where we were so primitive that we would purchase Internet in increments
of time. When you went on you had to know where you were going. There was no time to waste! Each Internet Company would try to sell
you their Internet connection by giving you CDs with 10-100 free hours at a
time for an introductory thing. If your family was broke like mine, you
never paid for the Internet. Once
you were done with one, you would cancel the membership and switch to another
company for more free hours. After a year or so of bouncing between free
Internet deals we got the Internet sweet spot America Online. We had
never used AOL before. This was the place that connected millions little
boys to dirty chatrooms. It was
also the first place many young boys like myself searched for porn. It was great. I became great friends with porn. I also, like all young boys innately knew how to clear the
web browser. It’s just how we
developed. You got a boner and automatically
knew how to clear a browser. I thought I covered my tracks well. No one would be the wiser. This was before we knew how the world
worked. This was before we knew what cookies were and that AOL would send
commercial emails from sites you had visited. I didn’t know this either.
Weeks went by since meeting my good friend Internet
porn. My mother and I went to dinner. Being that she’s Russian and
English was her second language, sometimes there would be words she didn’t
completely understand. Between the
burger and the shake my mom asked, "What is boo cake and can I eat
it?" The world has never been the same.
