For January 2001

Future Shoes: "The other side of the tracks"

by Michael Finley

Computer User Columnist

I'm walking Beau by the railroad tracks in Saint Paul the other day. We like to seek out the unfrequented parts of town, so he can run off-leash without causing people to wet themselves out of fear. The sight of a 70-pound coal-black hound bounding across a snowy field right toward one with bared teeth has, I have observed, an unsettling effect if you don’t know he is merely going to flatten you on your back and oralize you. You expect to die.

Thus, the barren land alongside the tracks. Trains are infrequent here, so it's somewhat safe.

On one side of the tracks, cars and trucks dash back and forth on Interstate 94. On the other side is a line of old homes. In the summer and fall you can't see these houses because they are obscured by overgrown bushes and some Minnesota version of kudzu -- grapevine, I guess. Now, with winter blasting away all the green, the homes, particularly their alleys and backsides, are exposed.

The houses are good houses, but they aren't in very good shape. I can see loose shingles, cracked storm windows, and chinks up in the eaves gnawed where squirrels gnawed through.

Most conspicuously, I notice that every house on the little dead-ended half-block has a mini-dish for satellite TV somewhere on the property -- mounted on a battered garage, or next to the crumbling chimney, in one case even strapped to the crux of a hackberry tree.

This may seem interesting only because I was in an uninteresting place, stepping from tie to creosoted tie. But I had a thought here, and I'll tell you what it is. It is that people are letting their property go to pot because they are spending all their time watching TV and surfing the Net. At night we walk through many neighborhoods, and the sight everywhere is nearly the same -- the flickering blue light of the TV or computer monitor in an otherwise dark room.

I know the temptation. One of my earliest memories is trying to watch "Howdy Doody" while my mom tried to vacuum the TV room rug. This was well before my thirties. Mom's attitude was, "I'm sure your TV is vastly more important than my maintaining a proper home." My attitude -- well I didn’t even have one, I just wanted to hear what Chief Thunderthud said to Clarabelle, and the roar of the Kirby put that delicate process in jeopardy.

Well, imagine that process multiplied by 200 channels, plus HBO, plus pay per view, and then multiplied again by 150 million homes. There is so much to watch, and so much to ponder, that something in the daily schedule has to give. Here, along a dead-end street in Saint Paul, people appear to be choosing TV over basic home maintenance.

"Honey, the cat fell through the kitchen floor."

"In a sec, I'm downloading a file."

I don’t say this to be judgmental, but to suggest that, even in our infinitely elastic, 24/7 world, time is still time. The longer we watch the screen, the bigger the hole in the floor grows, and the more cats fall in. Eventually, the basement is full of cats and we throw up our hands as if God brought us to this place.

I can see this thing going two ways. One, we decide there are truly more important things than fixing a leak in the roof. I still remember that awful Kirby, and the precious moments of puppet joy it cost me. All work and no play, right?

Two is the opposite, all play and no work. In this scenario everything that is broken stays broken, and everything that isn’t broken eventually breaks. At the eleventh hour, we will look back on progress as the distraction that kept us from mending things, until mending them became unthinkable, and we were no different than dogs, habitual and impulsive, howling at the virtual moon.