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It's not the easiest thing for me to look back at my past writings with an objective eye, whether it is something from two weeks ago or 20 years gone. In my tenth grade AP English class (circa 1990), I wrote a few paragraphs on David Lynch for an assignment where we were to compose a descriptive essay. If I recall correctly, my tone was one of jaw-dropped admiration and the kind of effusive praise that can only come from the young and impressionable vis-a-vis their encounter with an artist who either works proudly outside the mainstream or has found a way to subvert the norm from within. I received high marks for my work, which might sound like gloating, if I didn't also confess that I look back on that essay with no small amount of embarrassment over its pretentiousness.

At that point in my life, I had had relatively few encounters with Lynch's work. I had seen Blue Velvet once, had yet to see Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, or Dune (the latter occurred for the first time only a few days ago) and was still in love with the idea of Wild at Heart, having missed my chance to see it the one week it played in Bend and with its home video release still a few months off in the future at this point in time. No, I was writing simply from the vantage point of loving Twin Peaks and being caught up in the mania and the hype surrounding said show, buzz that had not quite begun to crest in the fall of 1990. My amour fou with Lynch's oddities and eccentricities sprung almost entirely out of my fondness for this creation and it makes me regret my unrestrained fawning, particularly in light of how I much prefer the auteur's latter-day career (think post- Lost Highway) to much of what followed in the wake of Eraserhead.

Watching Twin Peaks was even more of a commitment and challenge for me than for most of its devoted fans. Without the monetary means for a satellite dish and with no hope of cable being installed anywhere nearby (it can be tough when you are living smack dab in the middle of a national forest), my family and I had four channels from which to choose. Well, to be perfectly accurate, three and a half. We got CBS and ABC stations from an affiliate in Eugene and PBS and an NBC/CBS hybrid broadcasting out of Bend. If that last comment sounds confusing, allow me to elaborate. The latter channel would opt for NBC prime time programming three days out of the week and CBS evening shows the rest of the time, which meant that we would sometimes have the same series playing on two of our four channels and that I was exposed to Murder She Wrote and Crazy Like a Fox but not St. Elsewhere and Hill Street Blues.

What the Bend stations did offer with their closer proximity was fairly decent reception. The Eugene stations would often be, as the weather-invoking description goes, "snowy." If one were lucky, the snow would be in color, which at least made it easier to make out what was going on in most shows. With a program like Twin Peaks, where on any given week, there were dream sequences and bizarre impressionistic imagery the likes of which didn't have precedence on evening programming, attempting to ferret out subtext and context (let alone the damn text itself!) from between the lines of static and interference was trying at best and hopeless at worst. But from April 1990 through June 1991, I stuck around for weekly helpings of pie, coffee, doughnuts (and one very lucky cherry stem) through several time and day scheduling changes that eventually left the show in the purgatory known as Saturday night.

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