This tape will self-destruct in five seconds...

My neural pathways are hard-wired by fifty years of media saturation.

Like an endless roll of Bounty paper towels, my brain has, for years, been busy sopping up little puddles of television, radio (AM, FM, and shortwave)...and odd, random things I've read.

I could read long before I was potty trained—which says as much about my potty training as my literacy. According to my mother, I taught myself to read at two, using the Sunday comics in The Washington Post (two full sections, back then!) as my primer. In reality, my father taught me by reading them to me every week, pointing to the words with his finger as we went. But he never copped to it.

I could read before I even knew what reading was. I remember one day when I was about four, my Dad and I were in “Zayre's” (Zayre was an east-coast discount chain a lot like K-Mart) and he saw a rack of kids’ books. "Wait here a minute," he said, while he went and over and checked out the books. The title of one book in particular caught my eye: Teach Me to Read. I remember getting a little excited when my Dad picked up that book, and thinking Oboy! Maybe he’s gonna teach me how to read!” I still have the book. It’s old-school. Skate. Skates. Book. Books. Have you a book?

Anyway, I don’t remember a time when I didn't know how to read, but I do remember being mystified by many of the things I read, and those things have stayed have woven themselves right into the fabric of my mind. And I used to read anything in front of me. (Still do.)

I was about five years old in 1963—I think that was the first time I read the C&P Telephone Company Directory for Northern Virginia. No, not the names and addresses—just the Yellow Page ads and the stuff in the front. I learned that a BEEP tone, heard every fifteen seconds,

meant that the person you were talking to was recording the call. The BEEP tone was required by law. While I took the warning quite seriously, I secretly wondered how the phone company could tell if you were recording your calls without the BEEP. I discovered that Bail Bond companies had funny names: AAaffordable Bail Bonds, AAAAnytime Bail Bonds. The phone book didn’t explain what a bail bond is.)

But the most amazing thing in the book was the Picturephone. The phone of the future! Soon, with the Picturephone, we’d be able to see who we’re talking to! A Picturephone Center was being installed at the 1964 New York World’s Fair! With links to Chicago and Los Angeles!

So, apparently, it didn’t pan out. I always wondered what happened. Wikipedia says it was too expensive. But to this day, every time I see a Webcam, I think Picturephone!

New(ish) technology, old fixations, and the persistence of memory