My Weird Memory and VHS Tapes – Thoughts from January 15 and 21, 2023

January 15, 2023

I have a weird memory. When I hear the name Neil, I can think of Neil Patrick Harris, Neil Armstrong, Vince Neil, Neil Peart, and Neil from the Young Ones. My middle name is Patrick like Neil Patrick Harris, but I don’t use mine much. I have friends, relatives, and a wife with a derivation of Pat in their name. I can also name Patrick Stuart, Pat from Saturday Night Live, Patrick Dempsey, Patti LaBelle, Pat Sajak, Patricia Heaton, Pat McCormick, and Patrick Star from Sponge Bob Square Pants. Some spellings of the names I had to look up, but I just looked up what came to mind. My references are mainly older, but they are wide ranging. Some people surprised me when I looked up their names. Pat McCormick was a name I had in my head, but he wasn’t who I was expecting. When I saw him, I wondered why I had that name in my head. I could name things he’s been in, but his face did not say Pat McCormick to me.

January 21, 2023

I got a device to record my VHS videos. It records onto removable memory and has a small screen to see the video coming in. All I needed was a VCR, which I already had. It was a high-quality recorder I used to edit videos. I had to vacuum the VCR and the area where I would be putting it. When I plugged everything in, I could see a picture from the VCR on the screen. I got a video from two boxes of home videos and put it in the machine. But wait a minute before you get excited. It wouldn’t take the video past the opening. I tried several times and finally opened the machine up to see if I could figure out what was wrong. The only thing I could figure out was whatever was supposed to suck the video in wasn’t sucking or moving at all.

By the time I gave up on fixing the VCR, Patti came home from work. She thought we had a VCR in the bedroom and I told her that’s what I thought, but it was just a DVD player. I think I threw out all the old VCRs because I had my fancy one I was going to use. When I searched for VCRs online, it didn’t surprise me to find that the machines were used and expensive or refurbished and really expensive. I debated what to do through the next day and decided to order the least expensive refurbished machine. The VCR cost many times what the recorder with a screen cost. I’m getting the VCR tomorrow so we’ll see. I probably won’t be able to try it until Monday night. This is just the first of many things that could go wrong. I don’t even know if the video tapes will play or if what’s on them is worth recording, but I’d rather find out now than wait any longer.

It seems like I have subconsciously chosen to collect things I’ve created in the past because I don’t have time to create new things. I also want to start recording my old cassettes of songs from both my four-track cassettes and even my eight-track ADAT recorder. Those are where my highest quality recordings are. I’m hoping I can get the individual tracks so I can remix them as I’ve wanted to do for years. Living in the past is my future. Alright, calm down, Brian. Let’s not get melodramatic here. My final decision to transfer this analog information to digital is doing it before it’s too late. I may have already waited too long so I want to do it now.