Analog Purgatory

I had thought I had watched the last analog TV of my life on my porch the night the Lakers went up 3-1 on the Magic (because Jameer Nelson decided to play the exact opposite defense you play when your team is up by 3 with only seconds left).

It was the night before the big June 12 digital switchover.

The game was over. I collapsed the attenae and watched as the screen went snowy. Then I clicked the TV off. Dropped it out into the garage.

I had long dreaded this moment, even after Obama extended the deadline from February.

I know there are options, but I just can't let it go. For whatever reason.

The other night I plugged it into a socket in the garage. I fished out the damaged antennae and attached it, just to see what would happen.

And I found ... glorious programming!

Analog purgatory. With the strongest signal coming from Charlotte, no less.

Looping info-packages on how to handle the digital switchover.

It's almost like the joy one of my dear cousins gets out of religiously watching the TV Guide channel scroll by, over and over, all day.

Like her, I can't get enough of it.

I turn on the analog purgatory as I grill food, drink a beer and smoke a clove.

The chatter is comforting, the feeling of having been left behind in the rapture. Battling post-apocalyptic isolation with but a few remaining survivors.

They even offer trivia on when the earliest digital signal was sent. Did you know it was like 1994 or something? Or maybe 1999? I don't know; I wasn't really paying attention.

Alas, nothing can last forever.

Throughout all the regurgitated instructions of how to screw a cable into a box then screw another cable into another place, and after all the interviews with electronics experts and the suprisingly clean graphics ... they let us know that they will stop doing what they're doing on July 6.

Well, just so you know, this one loyal viewer is melancholy.