If you plug in an antenna into your television and scan the local channels, you'll find Partridge Family and Walker Texas Ranger and the Jetsons and Stargate and My Two Dads and Sanford and Son and the Beverly Hillbillies streaming on a dozen forgotten .3 and .4 channels, interspersed with ads for electric wheelchairs and mesothelioma class actions and reading glasses like it's 2:37 pm on April 14, 1998.

If you walk in your area downtown with your phone in your pocket and look in the windows of the strange stores you've only driven past, you'll find collections of tennis rackets and VCRs and ladders and travel itineraries to Honolulu, and you can just walk in and talk with someone 72 years old who's run the store for 50 years, and maybe you'll buy or maybe you won't, but they are there.

And you can repair your shoes or hem your pants or put an old suit up for consignment like someone who would have done this on a lunch hour in 1987. And there is a local grocer that is slightly more expensive than Walmart but it is run by a married couple whose kids don't want the store anymore but you will get the best cheese you've had and a soda you'd forgotten about and an old man will put a little paper receipt printed with real purple ink and put it in a brown paper bag and wish you a good day.

If you start to insist on paying with only cash and if you start to eat at the first place you see and if you stop using a drive thru and an ATM card and DoorDash and Amazon Prime, you'll soon realize there's an entire world out there that is still there, and it is fading slowly, but not for you, for you are the one who are just discovering it, it may be crumbling but you are there to see it and to stand firm upon it for a little longer.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5905127&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310911",#50143660)

1. Prepare for yourself some youthful nostalgic beverage--maybe a cup of hot cider, maybe a cup of cocoa with whole milk and a few marshmallows, you have to make it yourself, at home, something you haven't had in years but that you'd probably sip with a high school sweetheart in autumn--and get in your car and go drive to a nearby park in the evening and park at the curb in the dark point between two of the street lamps. Then turn on Delilah. https://www.delilah.com/station-map You can find the terrestrial station nearby, not streaming, tune it on your radio, and listen for 30 to 40 minutes. Sip your beverage, close your eyes, and listen.

2. Go to your local library. You probably image it filled with roving homeless men browsing for R@YGOLD on the PCs and while that is true, you can walk around a bit and find the fiction section and just let your eyes look over the books. Pick one. Don't spend time trying to review the "best" one, find one that seems vaguely familiar or nostalgic, but the other important part is that the book should be old, it should be something the library has held for a long time and is just popular enough to keep around but not popular enough that it's been replaced with a newer edition, in that generic taupe or forest or wine hardback cover, and take a book that others have checked out 10, 20, 30 years ago, running your finger along any dates on the inside pages, then go borrow it, and find a place to read, ideally a park bench (maybe the same one as (1)), and touch the book and read the book.

3. Perhaps with that book, or perhaps with a recent copy of the Journal or the New Yorker, go to a local diner. (You can spend a little time on the Internet for this one, I won't tell.) Find an old diner. Find one where there's vinyl stools and a formica countertop and well used ceramic brown coffee cups and go there for breakfast one morning. Order whatever is the special on the markerboard. Eat the toast with the butter and the jam. Keep saying yes to the warm-up of your bitter black coffee. Let your spoon tap the big container of sugar. Eavesdrop a little to the men in flannel shirts who take a seat near you. Add extra pepper to the hash browns.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5905127&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310911",#50144257)

I think sometimes people talk about the old world like it is gone. I dont know that it is gone. I think mostly we quit looking for it.

There are pieces of the twentieth century all around you yet. You dont have to go far. But you do have to go on purpose.

You can put an antenna on your television and turn through them little channels nobody knows the names of. The .3 and the .4 channels. And there will be The Partridge Family and Walker Texas Ranger and The Jetsons and Sanford and Son and The Beverly Hillbillies. One after another. Then somebody selling an electric wheelchair. Then a lawyer wanting to know if you ever worked around asbestos. Then reading glasses.

You can sit there long enough and it will get to feeling like it is 2:37 in the afternoon on April 14th of 1998 and nothing in particular has happened.

I dont think that is altogether a bad feeling.

Same thing downtown.

Most folks drive past those old stores for twenty years and never once go inside. You park the car and leave the telephone in your pocket and start walking and you will find all manner of things. Tennis rackets. VCRs. Ladders. Old suitcases. Travel brochures telling you how to get to Honolulu.

And behind the counter there may be a man seventy-two years old who has stood behind that same counter since he was twenty-two.

You can talk to him.

You dont have to buy anything.

Though maybe you will.

There are still people who will mend your shoes. There are still women who will hem your trousers. You can take an old suit someplace and put it up for consignment just like a man might have done on his lunch hour in 1987 and never thought there was anything peculiar about it.

There is probably a grocery store somewhere near you that costs a little more than Walmart. Maybe a husband and wife own it. Their children dont want it and when they are gone the store will be gone too.

But it aint gone today.

Today you can go in there and buy some cheese that tastes like something. You can find a soda you had forgotten existed. An old man will ring it up and tear off a little paper receipt printed in purple ink and put your things in a brown sack and tell you to have a good day.

And he will mean it.

I think if a person starts carrying cash again and eating at the first little restaurant he comes to instead of looking at fifty of them on a telephone, if he quits going through the drive-thru and quits having every object he wants brought to his front door by tomorrow morning, he will commence to notice something.

There is another world underneath this one.

Or maybe it is the same world and this one just got built over it.

It is still there. Not everywhere. And not forever.

Some of those stores will close. Some of those people will die. The children will sell the building and somebody will tear the sign down and whatever comes next will be cleaner and quicker and you probably wont have any reason to talk to anybody when you go in.

That is the way of it.

But it has not happened yet.

And there is something to be said for knowing that.

Something to be said for walking into that old world while the door is still unlocked and standing there a while.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5905127&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310911",#50143848)

You do not have to be this way, and there is time for you to blank this reply and realize that it is in the silence, not the slop, that we live a little, but that is not my choice to make, friend, it can only be yours.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5905127&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310911",#50144258)