Dark Time

 When I was in high school, I had a curfew.  My father's dictum was, "Nothing good happens to a girl after midnight."  One of my vivid memories from high school is my Dad dozing on the couch in front of the TV waiting for me to get home on Friday and Saturday nights.  So, what kept me from just tiptoeing past my father's sleeping form if I came home later than midnight?  I couldn't break curfew because of my Dad's alarm clock:  Television actually SIGNED OFF THE AIR at midnight.  There was a waving American flag with the "Star Spangled Banner" playing in the background.  The song was like an alarm to my father, and my happy little ass had better be in the door before the anthem finished.  The waving flag and anthem was then eclipsed by the 'test pattern', or sometimes just 'snow' until television signed back on at 7:00am.  Here's what I mean by test pattern.  It was routinely used as a signal to viewers their TV was not malfunctioning, but rather it was intentionally off the airways.

My point is television went off the air.  Now, true, there were only three stations plus one independent station in 1966, but still, can you imagine in today's shrinking globe a main stream media provider going DARK for seven hours?  I'm not going to claim 'life was so much better' in the supposed good old days because it truly wasn't.  However, I do miss what I think of as 'dark time'.  Even in those days, the United States had a frantic pace of life compared to other developed countries, but compared to today's insistence on a 24/7 life; it was idyllic. 

Life wasn't lived around the clock.  People who worked the 'swing shift' (3-11pm) or 'the graveyard' (11-7am) were pitied.  They were so out of sync with everyone else.  Mostly nothing was open past midnight except bars, the type referred to today as 'dive bars', and they certainly didn't serve food.  You couldn't shop for groceries or for anything else.  There were no all night restaurants except at truck stops, and even back then, truck stops were not known either for their cuisine or their atmosphere.  I can personally attest to this since me and my idiot college girl friends would go to the Dinko Truck Stop outside of Norman, Oklahoma - up and coming town of 25,000 - around 3am. for a 'Dinko Darling' meal.  [Don't ask.  I can't imagine how we avoided ptomaine.  19 year old bodies, I suppose.]  My point is in 1969 in a college town, nothing was open in the middle of the night.  

These days we carry around the 24/7 media provider in our pockets.  For eleven years I monitored my father who was in a dementia care facility.  I called the graveyard shift nurses routinely, and they also called me.  (This was the easiest staff to reach for a 'chat'.)  I slept with my phone turned on to receive their calls or texts right next to my pillow.  That experience trained me to be 'on the grid' 24/7.  That night time experience also trained me to use my phone to play audio books to help me get back to sleep. 

The reality now is I read the news across two major news outlets, listen to audio books, search for e-books and audiobooks to check out for myself and Cedric from eight libraries,  daily use our family channel on Whatsapp, monitor the weather across several locations, look at recipes, find answers to knowledge questions, take pictures, make videos, play games, and clean out my email on a daily basis.  I'm ashamed to say lots of those activities go on sporadically throughout the night.  

The smart phone is so integrated into my life, I don't have the desire or will power to go off grid for more than a few hours at a time.  The convenience of having information, entertainment, and basic knowledge available constantly seems like library heaven to me.  (FYI:  I was supposed to be a librarian, and it's one of my few regrets that I chose teacher over librarian.)

I think it would be beneficial to turn off my phone for seven or eight hours a day of 'dark time' because propaganda, misinformation, data mining, and going down rabbit trails seem to be overwhelming the positive aspects of 24/7 information.  Granted, we are in the earliest days of this phenomena, but individually stepping back and reclaiming dark time in the electronic age may help restore perspective.   I’m identifying feelings of anxiety, helplessness, insignificance, and anger in myself all of which has been intensified by the pandemic phenomena.   I also know those feelings are rooted in the information barrage that is today’s life in 2021.  There are too many choices every direction I look.  I think I need some dark time.