Old house keys were imperfect. If all you’ve ever known are $150 car key fobs, it’s hard to appreciate how finicky they could be. Your parents would make you a copy that didn’t fit the lock exactly, or over time the lock would wear. So to get all key and the lock to line up, sometimes you’d have to physically move the key around in the hole to get it to turn. (Yes, like that.)

First of all, they were called mix tapes. Secondly, we had special machines called boomboxes. (We also had tape decks.) The sound was horrible but that’s a different post. You’d go to the store and buy blank tapes. You’d drop one in, wait for the radio to play your desired song (which could be a really long time), and then reach over and hit “record” at the exact right moment. You’d hope that the DJ wouldn’t talk over the intro and that you didn’t miss too much of the start. Then you’d stop the recording at the end of the song. Basically, you were glued to your boombox for hours and ended up with crap. Fancier boomboxes had two tape decks, though, so you could borrow someone else’s cassette, play it in one, hit record on the blank tape, and get a good copy that way. Each tape would hold maybe a dozen songs per side. (Oh, yeah: you had to flip the tape over when you were halfway through, and if you didn’t plan things right, you’d have a 2- or 3- minute block of silence at the end of each side.

Yes. At the time. Watching it now, I can’t understand it, either.

“My child, you say you and your friends are being hunted in your dreams? And they’re turning up dead? And you just emerged from a dream with a physical hat that literally belonged to a man I myself killed about 15 years ago? Sounds like you’re just tired, you should get some sleep.”

Somehow, none of us caught that.

They didn’t. Kids were told to be home at a particular time, usually by sundown because we didn’t wear watches, and so when things got dim and we could no longer see the ball we were trying to hit, or realized all the streetlights were on, we got on our bikes and rode home by ourselves.