The 80s and other fun stuff

"No way!"  "Yes way!"

-Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure

  If nothing else the 80s was a time for trends.  There are so many things I can say ‘remember…’ and the people of my generation will most likely remember without a doubt.  Maybe its because the 80s were my childhood, but I can’t really say the same with the 90s.  It seems harder to come up with ‘remember this or remember that…’  I was watching Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey last night.  Its not a great sequel to the movie, but I’ve seen worse sequels too.  I remember watching the cartoon and I remember they even had a cereal for awhile.  It came with a cassette tape holder shaped like the time travel phone booth.  That was before CDs and definately before anyone knew what the hell an MP3 was.  As I grow older its sometimes funny to notice the passage of time. 

  I’m at that age where I’m not quite into the ‘normal’ routines of a adult member of our society (everyone remember ‘thirtysomething’?), but I’m not young enough now to really know what’s in and hip and whatever. (do people still say hip?)  So things are very interesting right now.  There’s things that I remember from my childhood that are having a resurgance now, little kids are finding them new again.  I found it amusing that kids were discovering the original Nintendo games, but not on an old school NES system, but on their Gameboy Micras.  Do you remember those big, grey cartridges, the light zapper gun, Mario craze?  I remember the cereal that was half Mario and half Legend of Zelda.  The Mario cartoons that you’d sit through all week, waiting until friday when they showed the Legend of Zelda cartoon instead. 

  I gave this talk a couple of years ago to a group of 6th grade kids about getting a college education and how it pays off, that sort of thing.  I ended up there becuase the professor of my course was also one of the directors in a program that gave talks to kids early about college, hoping to drill the idea of going to college into their little minds from early on.  Anyway, there’s this part where you go through what one can afford on minimum wage in Texas (which is pathetic compared to the rest of the nation).  Of course, you can’t afford much, but it was put into little catagories.  There was one catagory for technology there and I think the most they could spend on that was $50, might have been less.  Anyway, I asked them how much a Discman cost.  Only two kids out of the entire class knew what the hell a Discman was.  But then I said MP3 player and all these hands shot up.  It just felt surreal.  To me it hadn’t felt that long since I was in high school and you were on the cutting edge if you had a Discman.  Now its not even considered a dinosaur, kids don’t know what it is.  Then I finished my spiel, the bell had rung and kids were heading to their next class or lunch or something.  Anyway, a few kids hung back to ask me questions about college and the like.  This one little girl hung back until the others were done and then came to talk to me about college and what my major was and the like.  After I mentioned screenwriting, she told me how she wanted to act so maybe she’d see me around.  Then gave me a big smile and went skipping after her friends giggling and the like.  It took me a minute to realize that she had been flirting with me.  It just felt really strange.  I’ve been hit on before, but not by a girl half my age.  It was kind of flattering, but kind of weird.

  Its kind of a strange experience to get older.  To see what you know passed by and moved on.  And to see things that you knew come back, passed off as some new idea or product.  I got into a discussion once about how things seem to pass faster the older you get.  I thought about it and said that it was based on experiences.  When you’re a kid, you look forward to things because there’s still a sense of the unexpected.  You don’t know what’s going to happen, you don’t know what to expect.  So, you look forward to Christmas and Easter, birthdays, and classroom parties.  But everything seems to move so slow inbetween.  But its because you’re still experiencing things, even as it just seems like the same old stuff.  A kid’s life is from one moment to another, they look forward to something in the distance but it just flits in and out of their mind from time to time.  The rest is spent in that moment to moment existance.  As you get older, as you have more experiences there are less suprises to life, there’s more things that you come to know what to expect.  You know how the family Christmas will happen, you know what your birthday will probably be like.  And the time inbetween you make your way through, but you don’t really pay much attention to the moment to moment.  You just want to get through class, get done with work, get home, get dinner, get some sleep.  Instead of going from one moment to the next, its just from one event to another.  You’re living life in larger chunks of time, which is why time seems to speed up the older you get.

  And before I go, here’s some things I remember from the 80s.

Nintendo was top dog in video games

G.I. Joe, He-Man, Knight Rider, and the A-Team

Molly Ringwald was cute, but Phoebe Cates was hot

Conan the Barbarian was who you dreamed being like, the Karate Kid, Daniel-San was who you could be

The first ‘whoa!’ came from Ted, from Bill & Ted, the next came from Joey, Blossom’s older brother

Stuff was totally tubular in the 80s.

Slap wrist bracelets and chinese pencil fights

War Games and Johnny 5

Elm Street and Summer Camp were not safe places to be

Michael Jackson was black, cool, and not a pervert

Pee-Wee Herman was naturally white, cool, and not a pervert

Everything was cooler in neon

Big hair and hair crimping

Max Hedrome and Slimer

  There’s plenty more, but that’s it for me.  Catch you later dudes!

-Damien

How come I couldn’t go to a school like this…

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