Day: Lazy Saturday.
Position: Laying on the couch with a pair of Sony Sport Walkman headphones, one side in the ear and the other side out of the ear.
Event: Playing Marvel VS Capcom on the Dreamcast while listening to Salute Your Shorts in the background and the song What They Do by the Roots.
Those lazy Saturdays were the epitome of childhood ecstasy. There was nothing like sinking into that perfect spot on the couch. It was that spot that just let you melt into the cushion and blanket yourself with that warm-feeling you get from eating chocolate-chip cookies and milk. The Walkman sat to the left of your body pillow while one ear was filled with the beats of the Roots and Tribe Called Quest. The familiar sounds of “hadouken” and the chanting of “awful waffle” melded together like they were yin and yang.
Those were the days. That pair of old-school Sony Sport headphones and Walkman were children of the decade responsible for the rise of hip-hop and the looming demise of the cassette player. That Dreamcast was on its’ last leg of cultural relevance before the crushing blows brought forth by the revolutionary PlayStation 2. Salute Your Shorts aired during the so-called golden age of Nickelodeon. Ahhh…
Wait a minute. I just did all those things a couple of weeks ago. While that plastic, yellow and grey set of headphones were the same, the means of getting said media was different from that time more than ten years ago. I was using a Dreamcast emulator on my Dell while my media center PC was playing that one episode where the kids sneaked out of camp to go on a date. Instead of a Sony Walkman cassette player, I had the Sony PlayStation Portable containing the playlist of all my adolescent staples. Thank you MP3s. If it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t be able to copy Electric Relaxation and What They Do to my various MP3 players.
Where Did You Get That?
Oh internet, if it wasn’t for you I wouldn’t be able to get any of my childhood media. Where else can I find those SNICK shows? God knows Nickelodeon will never show anything from that golden era unless a meteor struck the Earth.
Those emulators and ROMs I’ve collected throughout my late high-school years to now were all coded and created by the fanboys that loved these consoles. That first pair of old-school headphones that I loved so much that broke, I can buy another pair on Amazon or eBay.
All the available content on the net: applications, books, video, music, podcasts, pretty much anything a person can come up with, can all be found with no problem. Although in theory it’s no problem, the occasional predicament will come up. Some people just don’t want you to be able to download that song that took you 3 days to remember the name of. Or the internet provider lowers the bandwidth so the page that they don’t endorse takes forever to load.
While the net has some irritating aspects, it’s difficult to imagine a time when the internet wasn’t prevalent. The internet has become a resource for those who want to relive or research those lost childhood memories. From downloading episodes of You Can’t Do That On Television with a bit torrent client to reading the Warriors’ World forums, the vastness of the internet allows everyone to appreciate, create, and use.
That First Pair…
It brought me back to a time of innocence. I didn’t have to care about getting that A in pre-calc. I didn’t have to care about planning my entire career path in one sitting. I didn’t have to worry about making the decision of going back into an industry that sucks out my soul (retail = evil). In the words of Ahmad, “back in the day, when I was young, I’m not a kid anymore, some days I wish I was a kid again.” When I wear those Sony Sport headphones, I can go back.