Everything changed on the night of the blood moon.

Actually nothing changed, as far as I can see, but how awesome would that be as the opening for a novel, a drunken manifesto or a breakup letter?

If anything changed things it’s Facebook, and more specifically those wretched memes, which used to be funny but which now are not.

There was one specific meme that changed things for me. It was a photo of an old cradle-style phone with an earpiece, a mouthpiece, a dial and a cord that was roughly 12 inches long (if you wanted a longer cord, you had to pay Ma Bell a little extra, but then you could walk as much as 6 feet away from your phone during a conversation and it made you feel like rich folk.)

The message under this Facebook meme was something like: “If you remember these, you might be old.”

At which point everything changed. Because until that meme came along, I thought they were funny and that it was only other people who might be old. They’d show photos of crank-style phones, antique clothes wringers or milk in glass bottles, and I’d go: “Ha ha ha! What relics! People who remember those things are really old!” I’d chuckle and go dancing off, absolutely confident in my youthfulness because I never once used an antique clothes wringer or had milk in glass bottles delivered to my doorstep.

Then the meme factory (located in Swampwater, Louisiana) began pumping out Facebook photos designed to steal my youth and make me feel decrepit.

There’s the one featuring a silverish switch on the floor of your car just west of the brake petal. The switch was used to activate the car’s high beams via your foot and it was very convenient, by the way. But now, apparently, it is recognized only by people who were born in ancient times. “A high-beam gizmo activated with the foot! How bloody quaint!”

There was also a meme featuring a photo of a knob that was pulled out or pushed in to activate your car headlights, which didn’t come on automatically when you started your car, if you can imagine it.

Also appearing on Facebook, a photo of a simple clothes hanger sticking up from atop a gigantic television set. Young people have no idea what it’s for, I’m led to believe, but I know exactly why you’d stick a clothes hanger there and I remember being able to watch semi-dirty movies out of Canada because of it.

There’s a nonhilarious meme that shows a hand-held football game that involved tiny red lines blinking their way from one end of the gadget to the other. By the standards of today’s video games, that sucker is as archaic as a chamber pot, but in its day, it was a marvel of technology.

If you happened to be a kid who carried the Mattel Electronics Football unit onto the school bus, you were king for the day. Man, everyone wanted to be your friend if you had one of those suckers, and why not? We’re talking individual buttons to move left to right or to move down the field. We’re talking a whole button dedicated to punting and the sound effects?

The Mattel had like three different beeps to let you know when your tiny red light team was celebrating and when they were hanging their blinking heads in defeat. That was all-day fun right there, but today, if you remember it as vividly as I do, the entire Facebook universe will point at you and laugh.

Those old toll tickets with the mysterious holes punched in them? You lived in fear of having one blow out the window because rumor had it that if that happened, you had to pay a toll amount covering the entire length of the highway, which in those days was known as “The Pike.” On long trips, you had to do advanced calculus in order to figure out how much it was going to cost you to get off your exit. Holy crap, 35 cents just to shoot off into Freeport to do some shopping? Forget that noise.

Now remembering one of those tickets is a sure sign of decrepitude, as is recalling what it was like to have an answering machine that required tiny cassette tapes in order to run properly. Hell, if you remember cassette tapes at all, don’t mention it to a young Facebooker or they’ll try to slip you a Doans before hustling you off to an elderly housing unit, which in those days was called “The Old Folks Home.”

If you remember a time before the Internet, you might be old and you should probably start shopping for burial plots. If you remember floppy discs, the grinding sound of dial-up, the AOL welcome voice or cleaning gunk out of your mouse ball hole (which sounds filthy), you might be old. I mean really, really old. Practically dust already.

Travel alarm clocks? You’re old. Manual typewriters? Way old. Candy cigarettes? Holy crap, are you sure you’re even alive? The national anthem playing when TV went off air for the night? Let me help you cross the street.

And so on and so forth. It was a lot funnier when it was sock hops, hair curlers and poodle skirts. You know what they say: It stops being funny when it starts being you.

And now, a nap.

Mark LaFlamme is a Sun Journal staff writer. You can email him at mlaflamme@sunjournal.com, but he’s probably napping again.

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