Issue #29 Keith’s SciFi Musings Sunday, January 21, 2024
Most of my friends don’t even know what a radio is. Seriously.
I mean, OK. They know. Right? I mean, like, they have seen pictures of radios. Stuff like that. Plus there’s always those movies you can watch, the ones set back in time to once-upon-a-time like in 1973 when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, and you can see radios in those movies too. Some kid my age walking around in the streets with this huge contraption on his shoulder blasting tunes straight into the side of his face. And he looks happy.
Yeah. 1973 BCP - Before Cell Phones. That’s what my dad always calls it, talking about how much better everything was back then.
When I was what they would call a pre-teen, I used to get tired of listening to Dad always trying to “school” me on how what he called The Social Media and its related Gadgets of Trickery and Dickery were turning my brain into pudding.
“You kids, you don’t even know what to think - or whether you have permission to think - unless The Social Media tells you so,” he said one time when we were driving to the hardware store and I was asking him why he didn’t just have those tools he wanted delivered using “this thing called the internet that I guess you never heard of.”
What else he said was, “Unlike you, my boy, I still prefer to see human beings up close and personal. You know, talk to actual people with flesh and bones attached.”
“But I am talking to real people, dad. I don’t need to see their real flesh and bones just to know they’re real. And besides, how do you know for sure somebody’s got bones unless they’re sticking out through the skin, right? I mean, you’re just taking it for granted because of science, which I get, but just think about… ”
“If they’re on a screen, they’re not real.”
I started to deliver one of my knockout smart aleck comebacks, but my intelligence and acquaintance with previous consequences related to similar responses prevented me from doing so.
Anyway, I’m older now. I’m 16. And Dad was right. Which is why I now have a pet radio. It’s also why I have lost most of my friends, but I don’t much care. Who needs friends when you have a radio?
I just wish I could tell Dad about it, but he died a year ago. Just died is all. Was a few weeks later when I found the radio in the basement, sitting there on top of Dad’s workbench, sparkling and shining like a sequined gown on stage. And it had this big mouth on the front, which I thought was kinda weird, but also pretty cool.
“Never seen a radio with a mouth, I said, pretty much to myself. Or at least so I thought.
“You ever seen Peru?” the radio said.
I should have been scared, but instead, I felt less lonely.
“Naw. But I see where you’re going with this,” I said.
“And there you have it.”
“Yep. There I have it.”
“You have me and I have you.”
“Sounds good.”
“Oh, and Terrance? One thing.”
“What’s that?”
“I may have been wrong about the screen thing.”