It's been a long time since I've actually watched a TV die.
It's like watching a family member get sick. You notice odd little things - cough, weight loss, pallor - and all of a sudden they're thrashing in delirium.
Well, the bedroom TV has evidently decided that it is reaching the end of its days. We were watching some stupid movie on Saturday morning, and all of a sudden Partner said, "Look at the corners of the screen!"
Green. Bright green. The picture was bleeding outward, and the four corners of the screen were bathed in an eerie Shrek-colored glow.
It's not all the time. I think it only happens after the TV's been on for a while. It's an old TV anyway - probably between ten and fifteen years; Partner bought it from a coworker some years ago for twenty-five bucks, I think. It's a real dinosaur anyway, big and fat and heavy, the way TVs used to be as a rule. And it generates heat like a sumbitch.
It makes me remember the black-and-white TV I grew up with. It was probably purchased not long after I was born - a big console model, a Zenith, I think. Then, after ten years or so, for no apparent reason, its picture began to shrink, bit by bit, the longer the set was on. Finally, after four or five hours, the picture would disappear completely - kapow! - into a demonically bright little pinprick of light in the middle of the screen. (I held my eye up to that tiny spot of light more than once, and I swear to you that I was sure I could see the entire TV image in there. In retrospect, of course, putting my eyeball directly in line with a pure beam of cathode-ray emissions probably wasn't the smartest thing I could have done.) You had to turn the TV off and let it cool down when that happened, and sometimes, if the moon was in the right phase, you could resume your viewing after a while.
But we all knew the TV was doomed. That's when we bit the bullet and got our color TV. The sick black-and-white model moved into my dad's den in the basement, where it lived in fitful retirement for many years; Dad mostly watched “Bonanza” and “Gunsmoke” anyway, so the picture quality didn't make too much difference.
TVs don't seem to break down the way they used to. I somehow don't believe they're better made than they used to be, so there must be something else going on. But then, we don't use them up the way we used to; we replace them. In the old days, a TV was a serious investment, and you used it until it broke or exploded. Nowadays you're always shopping for a good deal, or a better model, or something a little sleeker. You're not replacing a broken device; you're just buying a slightly better/newer one.
Partner and I are of two minds on this subject. Partner likes to replace things. I, on the other hand, am a grim Calvinist, and believe in riding the horse until it whimpers in exhaustion and dies. (Well, not always. The lure of shiny new things speaks to me too.)
But the TV in the bedroom is spitting up rancid electrons as we speak, so there's not too much debate over what happens next.
See you at Best Buy.
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