I can still hear my father’s swearing as the new, glorious TV failed to come back on. The dog pissed himself and was never the same after. The bolt had opened a sappy gash down its trunk, a quite anthropomorphized injury. The source was a loblolly pine tree fifteen feet from our house, struck by lightning. The loudness of this sound confirmed for me that sound was, in fact, a wave of energy. The storm grew more raucous by the minute, and we had just begun exchanging nervous looks when an earsplitting crack seemingly evacuated every particle in the air, instantaneously accompanied by a sweep of white light. We were watching television in the living room-the news, given the hour. In southeastern North Carolina, we get relatively frequent thunderstorms from the heat and humidity. Me and my sister used the gargantuan box it came in as a fort in the garage for weeks, until the cardboard went limp from abuse. In early 2004, tempted by clever marketing, my father purchased a theatrically immense projection television, produced just before slim plasma became the norm. Even now he has the best and the brightest 4K setup any bigger and that television would dwarf the living room of their 1990s exurban tract house. At the time, I was authorized to call it. The phone number was for the severe weather hotline of the Raleigh National Weather Service. The dot exists because one day in 2006, I called a phone number on a little laminated card thumbtacked to a bulletin board in my bedroom. It even looks the same as it did back then, which is doubly rare on our Modern Internet: a green dot on a map of North Carolina. Que sera, sera.īut what was perhaps my most prized childhood online artifact is still online. Hours of child labor have since vanished into the ether with nothing to show for them. My Neopets have long gone extinct, my once meticulously curated Whyville avatar cast into the dustbin of history, my high scores on CoolMath4Kids dot com, purged.
IT IS ACCURATE to say that almost every trace my childhood ever imprinted upon the internet has disappeared.
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