One of the Many Losses

there are things current and future teens will never get to experience. there are many things.

but, worst of all, teenagers will never understand a staple part of my angsty life: dropping televisions from large buildings and watching them float silently toward the ground-- spinning in a quiet slow motion-- and waiting for that brilliant boom that can only be created by gravity, cement, and a cathode ray tube.

it is a very unique sort of pop that is generally followed by an uncontrollable maniacal laugh.

that pop was, at times, what made things okay during my teenage years of rebellion and knowing everything in the world. that pop was courtesy of a vacuum created by the cathode ray tube inside: it was a stress-relieving implosion.

if you have never dropped a tv from a four story parking garage or abandoned bowling alley, you likely have had times when it was difficult to communicate with me. you and i are on different wavelengths. i cannot express to you the feeling of watching something so typically symbolic of america's culture fall to its shattery death during the days of puberty. at times, when i found my friends upset, i would suggest we throw a tv off a building. and they would laugh, but i was serious.

and today's teens will never experience this. for one, monitors and televisions are no longer made with cathode ray tubes and can no longer boom-pop. also, televisions don't hold the same menacing power over society that they used to and there is nothing particularly freeing about destroying one.

plus, something about how very heavy the old televisions were related to the pay-off of dropping it after carrying it several flights of stairs.

once, when i was in high school, a few of us were making a music video to the beatles' maxwell's silver hammer and we were told explicitly that death could never be shown. if you know the song, you know death is more or less the chorus. but we got around it by filming a series of destructive metaphors-- like bees being eaten by ants, balloons popping, and a large television imploding.

i'm mostly sure that we used the assignment as an excuse to create chaos while calling it homework, but sometimes that's okay, too.

we had spidermanned up the side of an abandoned bowling alley and were pulling the television by rope while mathias (our camera man) waited below for the drop. and you should know it is amazingly difficult to hoist a 32" television three floors up. it took tim and me together to accomplish.

but just as soon as the tv was on the roof, the crimefighters arrived.

dununununununuh!

back then tim and i ran into the police on a weekly basis-- half the time it was because we were smoking weed in obvious places like the roof-top of an elementary school, and half the time it was because neighbors mistook hacky sacking for "throwing rocks at houses". but, there was no way we were going to call our tv-drop quits just because the cops came-- not after the sweaty battle of getting it high enough to drop. so we motioned for mathias to roll camera and let the tv fall to its imploding demise.

a word of advice for any of you looking to experience the sound of a television popping: police officers tend to mistake the pop for a gunshot and will react accordingly.

"drop your weapon and get down on the ground!" the first cop shouted at mathias.

"it's not a weapon," he cried, "it's my camera!"

"DROP YOU WEAPON AND GET DOWN ON THE GROUND!" the cop repeated, while pushing his own weapon forward.

mathias placed the camera down gently and proceeded to lay on his stomach while panicking inside. it should be mentioned that out of the three of us, mathias was likely the worst candidate for things like having a cop aiming a gun at his face. he was a very timid guy with very little cop-related experience and had an underlying fear that one mistake would have him deported back to canada.

while the first cop proceeded to push mathias about and question who was firing shots, the second cop sat me and tim down for a chat.

"so what's going on here?" he asked.

"we're filming a music video," tim said.

"we got a report that the two of you were up there stealing satellites."

"huh," i said, "no. we weren't doing that at all."

"what were you doing up there?" he continued.

"we were dropping a television off of the roof," tim said, "it's for our literature class. we have to film a music video and we can't show death."

"oh," he said, "well, you are aware that you can't just throw electronics off of roofs regardless? that is, technically, littering."

if i had a dollar for every time a cop tried to pin the technical crime of LITTERING on me, i'd have two dollars. it's like their second favorite crime. second only to TRESPASSING.

"we have a broom," tim said, "we were going to clean it up after we got the shot."

it's true: we did have a broom. and that broom saved us from a ticket.

not long after we'd explained the situation to our cop, mathias came stumbling from around the corner-- being pushed along by his cop-- and we snickered a little. watching your friend get wrongfully manhandled by a law enforcer isn't exactly funny, but it's one of those things you snicker at anyway. i think tim and i both wished we had been the one to deal with the more violent cop-- the two of us were much better at talking with police officers given how frequently we had to.

the two cops had a small chat with each other before having a small chat with us.

"so," the first cop said, "you guys do know why we acted the way we did, right? i mean, you understand that we thought there was gunfire-- so, you know, we had the right to treat you like we did."

mathias just kept his head down. tim and i smiled, enjoying the experience of a cop worrying we might call what they had done Unjust.

the music video caused a few more cop run-ins, kyle's shattered windshield, and a good amount of laughs at school. but we got an A. overall, it was a great adventure during some wonderfully immature days.

but to bring it back to televisions-- if i may-- tim and i continued to make an event out of exploding tv's on days we were feeling low. we'd film most of it, too. in fact, later on in my college years, i wound up forced to use a lot of it as b-roll in a last-minute student documentary. and eventually, a friend told us both about a website where you could pick up free television sets. and not just tv's, but fridges, chairs, and even toilets.

it was a magical website called craigslist.

in some ways, i feel like my love for throwing television sets from buildings lead me out of the stressful days of puberty and into a world of responsibility. it lead me to craigslist which lead me to college and my first jobs in san francisco. in fact, craigslist has always been the way i've found apartments, actors for short films, computers, furniture, and even good old fashioned entertainment.

and no teenagers will ever experience that the way i have. because televisions and computer monitors no longer have a cathode ray tube and no longer pop.