{"id":96,"date":"2008-05-25T19:07:40","date_gmt":"2008-05-26T00:07:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.greatsociety.org\/?p=96"},"modified":"2018-10-31T12:48:56","modified_gmt":"2018-10-31T16:48:56","slug":"weekends","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/?p=96","title":{"rendered":"Weekends"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been trying to piece together my childhood weekends. <\/span>Of course, when very young, it was up early on Saturdays for cartoons like The Little\u2019s<\/em> and Smurfs<\/em> and so on, which gradually morphed into the unlimited crappy sci-fi that was endlessly run on the UHF channels \u2013 Space: 1999<\/em>, the Logan\u2019s Run<\/em> and Planet of the Apes<\/em> TV spin-off series. <\/span>There was also a fallback with some Blondie<\/em> movie or Bob Hope or similar black & white, light-hearted nostalgia nonsense.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Usually I\u2019d be able to TV myself until about noon. <\/span>Back then, though, we didn\u2019t have cable, and no Cartoon Network or whatever to draw you in 24\/7. <\/span>Entertainment pretty much ended at noon and, if I didn\u2019t go outside myself, mom would usually sweep in and pick me up by the ear and throw me out. <\/span>I\u2019d be forced to entertain myself until dusk, when I was due home. <\/span>That was no problem. <\/span>We lived in a big house right on the edge of Rock Creek Park. <\/span>I could go smash up beaver dams and go to the various places where thieves dumped wallets and guns and fuck around while mom sealed herself away and smoked up\/drank\/popped pills for hours on end. (Incidentally — returning those wallets to the owners turned a tidy profit. I made about $20 a week in reward money during grade school and junior high.)<\/p>\n

Saturday nights would eventually bleed into Brit-coms on PBS. <\/span>Channel 26 was our local station, and you had to stand in funny positions while holding the antenna to get the much more interesting channel 22. <\/span>I think that was out of Baltimore or Annapolis or something. <\/span>Channel 22, for a few years, was the only one showing Doctor Who<\/em>. <\/span>They were always the only one that showed Blake\u2019s 7<\/em> and Robin of Sherwood<\/em>. <\/span>Channel 26 is cheap and tawdry \u2013 the ever-repeating lineup of Are You Being Served?<\/em> and Keeping Up Appearances<\/em>. <\/span>You even had to turn to 22 for Chef!<\/em>, which didn\u2019t make sense. <\/span>Surely Chef!<\/em> was a cheap show. <\/span> <\/span>Channel 22 also had better pledge drives \u2013 they\u2019d be shorter and more polished instead of Robert Aubrey Davis professing how much he loved Doctor Who<\/em>, but not pronouncing anything right. <\/span>26 also teased us. <\/span>They treated Doctor Who like a wicked stepchild, airing it late at night through my high school years. <\/span>So the pledge drive would be at midnight or 1am in the middle of a serial and you could just tell that everyone involved thought that Who<\/em> was the geekiest thing this side of the kids they used to beat up in Hebrew school.<\/p>\n

Sundays also started early, though there was pretty stable TV there. <\/span>Always with the Tarzan<\/em>, and Channel 20\u2019s wonderful Kung Fu Theater. <\/span>Adventure stuff and chop-socky. <\/span>Sometimes monster movies. <\/span>It\u2019s weird watching one of the myriad Godzilla<\/em> sequels while eating breakfast.<\/p>\n

All over at noon, once again, and a repeat of Saturday. <\/span>Go kill beavers and climb trees and wade around in raw sewage for six hours or more.<\/p>\n

I really enjoyed those days. <\/span>Even when I am near a TV on weekend mornings today, it\u2019s total shit. <\/span>That regularity is gone, the Saturday morning cartoons are weird, and it seems like the only thing that channels can afford to rerun is Chips<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I certainly don\u2019t go out and fuck off in the woods anymore because I\u2019ve developed a dislike for bugs and ticks can kill you. <\/span>Used to be I\u2019d get ticks all the time, but now they\u2019re carrying a whole host of weird imaginary diseases.<\/p>\n

Well, I like to think they\u2019re imaginary. <\/span>I\u2019ve met two people who got Lyme disease from ticks. <\/span>So that really freaked me out. <\/span>It\u2019s like meeting people whose faces did get stuck that way or someone who really did put their eye out.<\/p>\n

I have my sci-fi Saturday ritual, mainly centered around Battlestar Galactica<\/em>, Doctor Who<\/em>, and Atlantis<\/em>, with support from my classic Doctor Who<\/em> DVD collection, which I watch with the production notes option turned on. <\/span>I\u2019m fascinated at how they ran a TV show from 1963-1989 with an apparent budget of $39 per episode and writers delivering scripts with hours to spare. <\/span><\/p>\n

For the most part, though, my weekends (when not working myself into an early grave) are spent trying to catch my breath. <\/span>Start drinking early, don\u2019t put on any clothes, walk around the apartment and enjoy the act of not speaking. <\/span>I have no phone (at least, not one that\u2019s plugged in), and I\u2019ve started turning off my cell phone after 6pm on weekdays and throughout the weekend. <\/span>If there\u2019s one invention that\u2019s destroyed Humanity, it\u2019s the telephone. <\/span>I\u2019d prefer people to send me letters. <\/span>They\u2019ll probably get a faster response, actually.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a hard thing to balance, though, because I\u2019m the publicity contact for my company (I\u2019m the only employee!). <\/span>So I\u2019m always on email and, like most publicists, I tell people that email is best. <\/span>I also check my cell phone for messages every couple hours. <\/span>I guess that\u2019s become my weekend pattern: <\/span>Monitor my email and periodically check my cell while drinking heavily and listening to records. I\u2019m the publicist with the mostist! <\/span>Or most cysts\u2026? <\/span><\/p>\n

Weird that I\u2019ve so easily started to think of myself as a publicist. <\/span>It\u2019s the natural progression for a publisher, I think. <\/span>It\u2019s certainly where the money is in publishing.<\/p>\n

From March to November, however, my record playing, nude apartment pacing is curtailed by my weekend job, which I\u2019ve bitched about here on the front page. <\/span>Money money, sure. <\/span>But I\u2019ve found that I\u2019m much happier walking around nude and drinking on the balcony at 9am while waving to horrified neighbors. <\/span>Isn\u2019t that everyone\u2019s goal? <\/span>If I can move full time into being a publicist, then I can behave that way all day every day. <\/span>All a publicist does is write an ultra short press release, spam their rolodex, and then have some poor intern nag the fuck out of the core media contacts and any reviewer that shows even mild interest. <\/span>For that they get $10,000. <\/span>Minimum. <\/span>And it\u2019s all \u201cpay me up front, motherfucker\u201d and \u201cunderstand that I can\u2019t do shit, I\u2019m just going to send an email to 20,000 people.\u201d <\/span>All with other people\u2019s books. <\/span>Books that you don\u2019t tear from your flesh to publish.<\/p>\n

Of course, having a clear dislike for publicists, I plan to go the extra mile. <\/span>I\u2019ll actually treat the author and publisher like a human being and not like a tourist from Dead Indian Bend, Nebraska showing interest in a shell game.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll also charge less because, really now, come on. <\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m thinking out loud about my future. <\/span>I shouldn\u2019t do that. <\/span>It betrays a sense of hope and ambition that just doesn\u2019t belong here. <\/span>Don\u2019t get the wrong idea \u2013 I still plan to retire to the used Airstream on the West Virginia hillside and raise rattlesnakes to sell at the local gas station. <\/span>I\u2019m just hoping that, maybe, I can retire and do that now instead of in my 60\u2019s or 70\u2019s.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been trying to piece together my childhood weekends. Of course, when very young, it was up early on Saturdays for cartoons like The Little\u2019s and Smurfs and so on, which gradually morphed into the unlimited crappy sci-fi that was …<\/p>\n

Weekends<\/span> Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[125,403],"class_list":["post-96","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rants","tag-childhood","tag-cult-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=96"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1151,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96\/revisions\/1151"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=96"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=96"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=96"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}