key word "previously" title "off the air" in misc. flash fiction

There used to be a time when teevee stations would sign-off for the evening, one-thirty in the morning, after the late show, after Letterman or whatever. They’d run the National Anthem or a prayer and then the channel would just stop. Cut to a test-pattern and dial tone to hold frequency and show nothing for hours, only to return at day-break with the farm report.

It’s impossible to imagine it now. Even if you’re older than I am and can remember it being that way for decades longer, it seems utterly impossible. There was a time when the television would admit that the world can pause for a while, to get some sleep. It could admit there are times when we can rest, not fret the up-to-the-minute everything. The worries of the world will still be there in the morning, you can rest.

They previously admitted there were times when nothing important happened and, even if it did, there was nothing to do about it until sunrise so don’t worry. An honest approach and, as with all honesty, it didn’t maximize their profit, so it was doomed from the start.

Telling us we have time to rest, problems can wait, it doesn’t sell ads for toothpaste or deodorant or the million other things that only sell if it’s constantly drilled into us that we’re falling behind and we’re not enough. If there are times when culture tells us “it’s okay for now” we won’t be so inclined to pay for dating sites or to make dinner twice as fast and ten times as bad, put exercise bikes on credit or vote for folks who’ll give us a shiny new war.

Seems quaint now, a ritual for reformed Amish who only eschew technology between one and five but back then it was completely natural. It was just the way things were, before the internet, before CNN shot a twenty-four-seven anxiety feed straight into our veins. Before they realized how much cash they lost by not filling us with fear every second of our lives, it seemed like the order of things and how the world would always work.

Even though teevee had only been around forty years at that point, if you’d grown up with it, you could only assume the hours when nothing happened were Permanent, were as without beginning or end as the sunrise itself. It’s a terrible quirk of our short lives that whatever seems normal to us when we’re young is imagined to be permanent truth. But when the changes inevitably come, we’re left to hang there and try to adapt to something that seems crazy.

So, let’s make a four-hour loop of that old test-pattern and play it on our phones and laptops, in the wee hours of the morning, so we can pretend that there is still a time when we’re allowed to turn off for a little while, a time when we can rest. Maybe then we’ll once again be able to be on.