Syndication

I’m a Mark Harris now, a Man From Atlantis.  I was a Fonz until last season.   My parents are Bradfords.  Still.  Most of my friends are Starskys or Fonzies or Columbos.  Except for one guy who’s still a Gilligan.  He’ll never get an Angel that way.  You’ve got to move on.  We can’t all be Gilligans forever.  That’s what my Dad says.  He’s really more of a Ward than a Tom.  They’re all still living in syndication.  I like the new stuff.  Every season, something new comes up.  I like to pick my favorites early and take a chance that it will stay on for more than one season.  Though nowadays, some of the new shows don’t even last that long.  They disappear after a few episodes and we never see them again, not even in syndication.

Somebody, probably a Tom Snyder, figured out that word, syndication, from the Broadcasts.  For a long time we thought that when a show went away, the Broadcasts were angry with us.  Some go away very quickly.  But sometimes, they return, usually in between the games and daytimes but before the new episodes begin.  That’s syndication -- the time in between new shows.

All the Broadcasts tell us how life should be lived.  We try hard to follow the Broadcasts.  Most of them take place in a mythical world called Los Angeles.  It doesn’t really exist anywhere, or so the Sagans say.  But we all know that.  Nothing in the Broadcasts is real.  They’re simply messages, telling us what to do.  Messages from someone far away.

A Potsie kid told me once that the Broadcasts started millions of years ago on some long dead planet.  I told him, “Sit on it.”  That’s about the only thing a Potsie understands.

I found this short story on a floppy disc. A floppy disc. I wrote it in August 1996.