80s

WARNING: Rambling ahead. Just a whole lot of rambling.

I'm trying to remember life in the 1980s. I was born in 1970, so my entire later childhood and teenage years were in the 80s. I grew up in the 80s.

This is an interesting position, I think. Because I remember the 70s, to a lesser degree. I was there for disco and punk rock... at least temporally. I was a kid so I didn't know punk rock from pop rocks. I heard of disco, of course.

The 70s was before the rise of cable TV, but at the heights of TV's general power. When I was really little, we only had whatever channel would come in using the antennae (bunny ears). That was basically KET and the local Fox 41. I saw Emergency, Bozo, and The Incredible Hulk.

But anyway... the 80s came. Things changed as they do. Cable was a thing. We were poor, so we didn't have it. But we did have it once for a few months, including The Movie Channel. It was great. I saw 1941 and Excalibur and a bunch of stuff I don't remember. Hell, I watched Excalibur when I was 12... probably too young. Those scenes of naked women juxtaposed against armored knights really left a lasting imprint on my brain.

In the 80s, you had rotary phones and push button phones at the same time. And phone cords that got twisted up. We didn't have a phone at all until I was about 16. If you have never lived in a world without a phone, that is probably hard to fathom. Like... how the fuck would we have called for an ambulance if we needed one? The answer is we'd run to the nearest neighbor with a phone. When I was about 8 in 1978 my mom and I lived alone on a hill in an old shack without a phone, bathroom, or sometimes electricity. There was an old lady about half a mile down the road who had a phone and would let mom use it if she needed.

So anyway. In the 80s you had the rise of the VHS. We didn't own a player but you could rent one with your movies. If I remember correctly, it was about $5 to rent the player for 3 days and I think $1 per movie. So one of the things we'd do on some weekends, after mom started working at a factory job, was rent a player and 3 movies. I got to pick one movie. The store had maybe a hundred or so movies and my focus was on fantasy and sci-fi.. so basically this one shelf with maybe 20 films on it. I watched Beastmaster, Road Warrior, and Weird Science many times.

The other way you'd catch a cool flick was when they would put it on TV as a special event. They did that frequently with Conan, Road Warrior, and First Blood.

For music, this was the reign of the cassette tape. My first foray into listening to music on my own was to get my hands on a cheap jam box and score a few bootleg cassettes at the flea market. Alabama's Roll On was the first, I think. Then a cousin hooked me up with some AC/DC and it was all over for me. I was a metalhead. When I got my job at Hardees, I would buy at least one tape every paycheck. Often it would be based on the cool ass album cover and names of songs, having no clue who the band was. I didn't read magazines and didn't know anyone who knew shit about it other than a couple guys at school who seemed to know what was up. They clued me in on Metallica.

It was like that, though. Word of mouth was perhaps the most potent form of advertising. Because you weren't going to see TV ads for the super cool shit like D&D (with exceptions... there was the cartoon) or Vinnie Vincent Invasion. You needed your stoner friend who was a year older than you to say "Check this out, man. It's badass."

We were afraid of being consumed in a nuclear fire. This is not hyperbole. We were in a cold war with the USSR and a full-blown nuclear arms race was the name of the game. We had post-apoc movies like Mad Max. I remember checking out books from our local library about survival. They had one called Nuclear Winter that scared the shit out of me. At one point I planned to move to South America and live in the Amazon... probably because I had watched Romancing the Stone a few times. Kathleen... sweet Kathleen.

Let's see... I rode the bus to school pretty much my entire career with the exception of my senior year when I carpooled with some guys. The road I lived on at the time was hilly and curvy. If it snowed and school let out, the bus driver would not attempt to go up the hill. So she would stop and let us out. It was about a mile and a half to my house from there. About 8 of us would get off and hoof it home. By the time I got home, I was alone because I lived near the other end of the road. It was a weird, dreamy time. I don't know if the driver was supposed to do that or not, but it was done.

My friend had a computer (Tandy) and so we did play some games. Test Drive, Galactic Conquest, Bards Tale, etc. But the idea of an "internet" didn't enter my vocabulary until around 1994. I didn't get my first computer until 2000. I think I got my first email, a Yahoo account, in 1996 or something. But in the 80s, almost nobody had a computer until much later in the decade.

We did have consoles. Specifically Atari 2600. My cousins had one, which we played on their huge floor model TV on the carpet in 1982. We didn't get an Atari until a few years later when mom started working. Combat, Pac-Man, Pitfall, Berserk, Duck Hunt, Asteroids, Space Invaders, Swordquest!

Lots of people smoked. Every restaurant had ashtrays, every car, everywhere. Yes, you would visit some office such as a doctor or whatever and you'd see people smoking inside. That's just how it was. It was less so in the 80s than the 70s, but still omnipresent.

In my experience, which I know is particular to me, there was never any discussion of race, gender, or sexual orientation in the better part of the 80s. Sexual orientation definitely became a topic as the decade progressed, with the AIDS epidemic. And I know it was a hot discussion point for a very long time before that, but those discussions never filtered down to my level: rural white trash. Fuck's sake, in 1982 I was still telling racist and gay jokes in school. EVERYONE DID. And even though I felt that nagging sensation that "this ain't right" it didn't stop me from occasionally doing it to get the yuck-yucks from my peers, who were mostly redneck boys who probably still tell them to this day.

It was a time.

Another topic nobody talked about was socialism. Holy shit... the fucking communists were the enemy! Socialism was very literally a dirty word. I had no idea what it meant other than it was "people who hate freedom". The level of propaganda against communism and socialism that blanketed the USA at that time is incomprehensible. If you are a leftist today posting on social media about politics you really have no idea how lucky you are to be able to do that at all. You couldn't breathe a positive word about that shit when I was a kid. It was exactly as bad as saying you were gay... and that shit would get you beat up.

Not the best of times. But it had its charms in other ways. We got B/X D&D, some great heavy metal, some classic movies, and some killer comics out of the deal.