This is the only way I know to explain it, so you’re going to have to meet me halfway - some of it might not make sense and I am going to refer to things that just aren’t in your world, but I want you to try, okay? Okay, picture this:

We didn’t have plasma screens in that time; a television was an actual box with dials on it and filled with grey and white dots that would resolve into images if you turned the dials just so, sometimes with a line that scrolled over the screen, carrying the images with it on a loop. These grey and white dots were called snow I think, and the volume made a roaring sound when the screen was full of them. They looked like sparks with all the heat sucked out of them, and sometimes no matter what you did to the dials, no images came. That empty roaring sound.

No? Or:

When the television was switched off at the end of the day (this was a ceremonial undertaking so important that an anthem played over images of people doing I hardly remember what but I think there was a pole vaulter) if the last images were static sometimes they seemed burned into the screen itself, you could see the traces of them as the screen grew darker around a white circle in the centre which itself shrank to a point and winked into nothing. As though the television was tunnelling into itself, goodnight images, goodnight pole vaulter, see you tomorrow, maybe.

I know it must sound like I am making all this up, but this is how living was, then. This is the last one - pay attention.

When we were fourteen we would go to these teen dances, the kind where you snuck in vodka in an empty hairspray bottle which then tasted of Final Net. We took the midnight bus back to M.’s place, snug in our final nets (please don’t do this, or wait a bit longer if you must) and we would sit with her mother in the living room filled with plants while she rolled cigarettes, watching crappy reruns. I know you don’t know what those are and it doesn’t matter, I can explain it later maybe, just tv shows that were as old or older than we were. We were watching Taxi and there was one guy in the live! studio! audience! just going for it with his laughter, no matter what everyone else was doing you could hear him quite clearly above the crowd. M.’s mother stopped rolling cigarettes for a moment and squinched up her face in disgust saying that fucking guy, that show off. And she imitated him and it was so uncannily spot on it slapped the drunk right out of me (did I tell you please don’t do this? Please don’t, or wait a little longer if you must) and then she paused and said seriously, you know I bet that guy’s dead now, and just as she was saying it you could hear him laughing HAW HAW HAW and then I was cold all over baby that’s what it’s like sometimes, when I can see how I am losing her.