Television is bad…
Television gets a bad rap most of the time. It’s been referred to as the boob tube in the past and it falls into the dreaded “screen” category in today’s times. Growing up my family loved tv. It was an integrated part of our life. I remember when we first got cable installed and, no kidding, have a firework memory associated with it. I think it was around 1981 and my friend John was over at my house and we were playing chess in my living room while the cable fellas were doing the install. No shit we were playing chess, and I think it was the last time I ever played chess. I mean why play chess when I can now watch the chess championships (which is also something I never did actually). At a minimum I would definitely be exposed to a much broader world.
…wait, some of it is fantastic right…
Here’s the thing, despite the bad rap, we had some great times watching tv as a family. Essentially my Mom would work her ass off all day taking care of the needs, and as many of the wants that she could, for six extremely varied wild ass kids. Then at night she would sit down in her seat, it wasn’t ever really referred to that way but it was definitely her seat, and she would watch tv with her kids to close out most days.
As a family we loved tv and loved movies and I would say we had strong opinions about what was good and what sucked. Cheers was outstanding and probably owns a spot in each of my family member’s hearts, I think, Dynasty sucked, Family Ties, Night Court, The Wonder Years, yes, yes and yes, MacGyver, no, Miami Vice, not so much, Fraggle Rock rocks, Small Wonder, it’s a wonder how this piece of crap was ever made. I could go on with this list for days to be honest, but this post isn’t entirely about my opinion on the quality of 70’s – 90’s tv shows unfortunately. Plus, a bunch of you die hard MacGyver fans are getting all pissed off at me and that’s no way to continue this entry.
…and sometimes it leaves a lasting mark…
One of these tv sessions involved me obtaining one of my longest standing and strangest, to an outsider at least, childhood nicknames. That nickname is Quimby, which my two older sisters still call me on occasion. Weird nickname eh. So it was born from the fact that the family was together watching a movie one night in the living room. I’m guessing I might’ve been 7 years old, maybe 8, and we’re watching some movie, at least as I recall, in which Burt Reynolds is playing a character that wants to have a baby and starts “interviewing” women to be the surrogate mother, or something like that. As part of the process the Burt character expresses that one of his name choices for the baby is Quimby. One of the interactions goes downhill quickly, the whole sexual tension through butting heads type story line I think, or this might’ve just been a comedic opportunity to express the absurdity of the process. Anyhow, as the woman is leaving subsequent to getting into a verbal disagreement with the Burt character she yells back, “Quimby sucks!” My oldest sister picking on her much younger brother, I won’t point out how mean this is because I feel like it is currently only my voice and she can’t really give her side of the story and maybe I had done something shitty to her but still, I’m like super young, sorry getting off track, begins calling me Quimby and then saying Quimby sucks. Like I said, who knows the context, but I can tell you it ended with me in tears as she continued to jab me with the whole Quimby reenactment. Knowing that she had this brilliant weapon at her disposal the nickname stuck as it was drawn upon in the days that followed, and weeks, and months, and years, and decades. To be fair, it did become a beloved nickname, not so sure it was beloved by me but beloved nonetheless.
However, I did embrace it on at least one occasion. A few years after the nickname had been born there was some wet cement that had been laid down in the road in front of our house and that night, after the hard working fellas that had laid that cement went home, probably to watch Baywatch (thumbs down) or some other shitty tv show (I’m looking at you Married With Children), I went out with some neighborhood friends to carve our names into the wet cement to be memorialized forever. We were like raccoons that wait for you to put your trash out and then converge on it at night. Well, I’m no dummy, so I wasn’t going to put my actual name into the wet cement because the cement guys and gals that put that shit down will literally rip your head off and use it as a soup bowl if they catch you doing that, so I took a stick and carved Quimby into the curb. Gloriously, we had caught the cement at the exact right time because it was still wet but not too wet. Usually in these situations you get to the cement too late and it has already set up considerably, so your mark just ends up being some scribbles marring the surface of the newly laid cement. I’m not saying I’m an expert at this or overly experienced, but I’m also not saying that I don’t have the dream of putting my name and handprints in cement one day. What resulted was basically the Chinese Theater textbook example of making your mark in cement. What I’m trying to say is, it was deep, so deep that after I did it even I went, oh, maybe that wasn’t a good idea. You could read it from the front window of our house it was so deep. As deep as it was (did I say it was deep) it was also glorious and for years Quimby was carved into our curb outside our house. I will say that they did come back and cover over it with like just a shmearing of wet cement over top of it to try to cover it up, only it was so deep and perfect that it didn’t really work and you could still totally make it out. I’m just hoping that some poor innocent local Quimby didn’t have his head used to eat a nice tomato bisque on my account, but I did know that my head stayed on. You Quimby? Nope, I’m Pat thank you very much. Genius.
…and can actually, despite being mind numbing, make memories for a lifetime.
So now for the actual firework memory that led me down this path to begin with. So my family’s sense of humor is probably slightly warped. Maybe that doesn’t state it the correct way, our sense of humor is in line with what’s actually really damn funny. As a result, we immediately thought The Simpsons was absolutely amazing. The stuff on the Tracy Ullman show into the early seasons is just outstanding. I have a friend that used to work on the show, left the show, and now works on the show again and he has special superhero status in my book. So cut to my oldest brother and I in our living room and somehow we end up watching some episodes of The Simpsons. Oh, here’s the other thing, you know how I said in my family we were kind of freaks about tv and movies, well we also used to tape a bunch of movies and shows that we liked. When I say a bunch, I mean like hundreds of VCR tapes filled with stuff we had taped…off of the television. One of those things, obviously, was The Simpsons. So my oldest brother and I find ourselves watching some episodes together, generational gap between us and everything. I feel like the rest of the family was around, like just doing stuff around the house. As you can imagine with 6 kids in an average size house there was frequently a lot of activity. My brother and I just happened to be dialed in through the noise to be focused on The Simpsons. So we’re watching the third episode of season one in which Homer gets fired, oh who cares about the plot, anyhow there is a scene in the episode in which Wendell, one of Bart’s classmates who is particularly prone to car sickness and is sitting with Bart on the bus, pukes his guts out at the end of a bus ride. When it gets to the puke scene, though my brother and I had both seen this episode before, we both just absolutely lose it. I don’t think the term falling existed back then, but we fell the fuck out. I think we both physically fell out of our chairs onto the floor in fits of laughter. So we’re cracking up and catching our breath and one of us musters up the phrase, “do it…again”, so we rewind it and hit it again. More falling out…”again”. We keep going, dying every time amongst a house of organizedish chaos and I don’t think anyone really paid us much attention. We were in our own hilarious world. I guess it’s another one of those situations in which we just shared a moment and laughed our asses off to tears. As much “distance” as there may have been between us, we sure looked like two idiot little brothers at this moment in time. Pure joy.
And the scene from The Simpsons was a masterpiece. It was the combination of the color of Wendell, the looks on his face, the sounds he made, and the amazing crescendo of the sound that was produced to signify his puking that was just a work of art. Well, don’t take my word for it, you should see it and listen to it for yourself. I’ve done a little editing to pull the scene together because as humans we don’t have long attention spans for this type of stuff these days, but it essentially captures the Wendell and Bart bus ride adventure. Enjoy!
Also, I thought it would be good to reproduce the effect my brother and I then applied by rewinding it and watching it again, and again, and again. This is a much more efficient way to do it as we had to actually rewind physical tape in a machine and then press play and hope we hit the right spot. I could watch this for hours.
So as much as tv can get a bad rap for rotting our brains and being included in the number of minutes we’re in front of a screen, it can also be an amazing uniter of families, whether immediate laughter ensues or it extends a lifetime. By lifetime I mean ending when that lifetime is over. I’m not asking you to put Quimby on my gravestone, please don’t put Quimby on my gravestone. Actually, shit, do what you want, I’ll be dead. I’ll probably be watching episode three of season one of The Simpsons with my brother, both of us laughing hysterically as we fall off our fucking clouds.