freaking out on the inside since 1981

Entries tagged as ‘1980s nostalgia’

go on home! who needs you talentless clowns, anyway?!

July 15, 2008 · 1 Comment

i guess if i took life (or myself) seriously, i would’ve spent a part of today digesting and then verbally spewing about the obama new yorker cover. but actually i don’t care? is that shameful, should i go into exile? i don’t care about barack obama. i want banksy to be president. now that his long-protected identity has been found out, he should petition the US government to let a british graffiti political commentator run for the ultimate gig.

anyway i don’t yet have the latest issue of the new yorker in my hot little hands because i’m too lazy to take the elevator down three flights to get my mail. matt will retrieve it, in an hour or two, like a carrier pigeon. this heat makes me feel like scarlet o’hara when all of the girls are taking their rest in this ridiculously huge room and servants are fanning them. i’ve honestly got organic white grapes to the right of me: who’s gonna hand feed them to me?!

what i really feel like talking about is how devolved i let myself get. i get myself to a point of such utter shamefulness that i finally snap out of it and rigorously work to re-refine myself. and then i get to refinement and so begins again the shame spiral. i hit the bottom today when i was recalling how “the bishop of battle” was my favorite movie when i was five.

it wasn’t even a movie! it was one-fourth of a movie, entitled “nightmares”. i guess that the bishop of battle was the second installment of four. it featured a super young emilio estevez as a rat-tailed arcade jock in california. his name was J.J. and everyone knew he was the best to ever live. he’d enter one of those slimy, dark, sticky-floored arcades, where you knew the pizza would just be THE BEST, and people would crowd around to watch him wreck the arcade games like he was an athlete. and by god. HE WAS.

so his main foe game was the bishop of battle, which featured this creepy green 3D bishop who talked about how he ruled over everything he saw or something. there were 13 progressively harder levels in the game and J.J. had only ever made it to 12. in the clip below, J.J. and his posse are tryin’ to beat the game and he loses. the arcade is closing, the groupies leave, and J.J. yells angrily after them. somebody tells him that level 13 probably doesn’t even exist! but J.J. wisely retorts that some guy in jersey got to it twice.

oh but if you find a clip later on in the movie!! J.J. makes it to the 13th level. but i won’t tell you what happens. only. REAL LIFE LASERS and the green 3D bishop himself showing up in a parking garage!!

it’s funny – these are my fond memories of being an only child: romping through the grass imagining i was in a surreal parallel universe with this electronic gun that my parents gave me (it had two different noises you could make, battery-powered) and watching epic cinema brilliance like the bishop of battle. my mom i think wanted me to be a scientist and plied me with the scientist start-up kit complete with magnifying glasses and glass cages and droppers and such. one year the japanese maple in the backyard suffered a beetle plague. my mom, hating the beetles, enlisted me to catch some. i caught two and they wouldn’t stop fighting to the death in their puny glass cage. i acted like a bigshot but i was truly horrified and petrified by the sight. I NEVER BECAME A SCIENTIST, are you surprised? she also plied me with a full kitchen set complete with a fake stove and plastic burgers and corn on the cob – I NEVER LEARNED TO COOK WELL, are you surprised?

i learned how to watch movies. still, it’s a long road from bresson to the bishop of battle. IT’S AN IMPORTANT road.

enjoy the music in this short clip. also, i’m turning into this guy:

Categories: 1980s · personal
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In three years, I’ll be the mother of a ‘Leash Kid’

June 22, 2008 · 3 Comments

today on my six mile hike i was thinking about kids on leashes.

even as a child of the 80s i did not directly experience the kid-on-a-leash phenomenon. yet i always seemed to be surrounded by peers who did. my mother was slightly too bourgeoisie for it to ever happen to me. i remember her sniffing disdainfully, any time we went to jc penny or jamesway (RIP jamesway) and saw a kid being led around like a little wild-eyed beast of burden. yet i wasn’t leashed because my family had any moral high ground. no: my mother was able to instill the fear of god/creepy pedos in me at an early age. before i describe that fear, let me explain the other ways that she managed to mold me into who i am today:

at the age of 18 months, weaning me off my bottle by telling me that the “baby animals” needed my bottles. and of course i dutifully obliged and moved onto the much less appealing sippy cup.

at the age of 4 years when i ripped up the house plant and she told me that i was making the house plant scream in pain. again, i dutifully obliged, even though, as an only child, ripping up the house plant and watching movies like black beauty on my 10 inch black and white tv were like the highlights of my small life.

and now, of course, the leash phase. my mother guaranteed that she’d never have to drag me along on any sort of unbecoming leash by telling me that if i EVER managed to wander from her sight in a public place, i would be stolen and never see my family again.

thanks, mom. who STEALS kids? especially introspective pig-tailed kids like me?

one more question: who are the leash parents kidding? do they REALLY think that anyone would really want to steal their wild ADD-addled children? they’re like mad cow children. who wants to deal with that? i say let ‘em roam. they’ll come back like manky stray cats, back home to you every night.

the following is the exact type of leash that i remember from the 80s. it’s weird to be an unleashed kid watching your unruly brethren led around on a fucking chain:

however, matthew confided in me and let me know that his brother, in fact, had to be led around on a leash. and his brother is not manky, nor does he have ADD. i think he was simply adventurous. but the best part of the whole story is the fact that matthew’s brother was not led around on a conventional leash – he was led around on a red faux leather CHEST HARNESS. like this:

i’m so proud of myself for breaking myself away from air conditioning, technology and the perils of this city only to roam around in nature pondering kidleash phenomena for at least 40 minutes.

Categories: Really though. Why?
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RIP product/place that I like: Chuck-e-Cheese

June 17, 2008 · Leave a Comment

no, the death of chuck-e-cheese has not happened, nor is it even imminent. what i base this RIP on is the mourning that i have for the eighties version of chuck-e-cheese. true, i have not stepped foot into this reputable establishment in nineteen years. yet i mourn for the implemented safety regulations that keep kids these days so much safer and cleaner than us children of the eighties. yes, it’s true that now you probably can’t catch TB or tetanus at chuck-e, but those were potential battle wounds that made us, the eighties children, better, stronger and brighter for it. i mourn for the renovations and the removal of convicted petty criminals stuffing themselves into the giant mouse suits. there are so many things that i mourn for, including but not limited to:

giant birds, mongrels and possessed bears that were darkened and silent on a side stage for 85% of your dining experience. then, someone/satan would trigger a switch, and their eyes would come aflame. their motorized mouths would move in unison to a tinny song. it was like they were imprisoned singers in a brothel or a 1930s speakeasy. they sang songs of quiet desperation as you happily chewed on your institutional pizza.

example:

red vinyl bench seats that stuck to the back of your legs (not enough coverage with the short-shorts you were wearing). the vinyl would be cracked and would smell of mildew, but the red vinyl promised so much in terms of pizza, ice cream and the distant promise that soon you would be unleashed to the fairy world of atari and cheap stationary rides. i am sure they would half-heartedly hose off the grime after each party.

there was this alice-in-wonderland-meets-the-mulleted-and-acid-washed-jeans-1980s honest to god life-sized PEEP HOLE that kids were forced to shimmy through if they wanted in on the fun. you literally had to work up the courage to brave dirt, claustrophobia, fecal matter and all that glorious stuff churned up on the bottom of keds sneakers just in order to get to all the fun shit.

the semi-fun shit was available to adults and children alike, no human portal required. there were arcade games and the stationary rides. but human portal was slight and accessible to children only. i was afraid of that hole. i stared at it mournfully for FOUR YEARS. i played half-hearted games of miss pac man and rode the stationary harley takin’ me to Nowhere as my peers shimmied through the hole and into the hands of rat-tailed pedophile carnies who worked the floor, the swings and the ball pit. oh, the ball pit. i weep for the ball pit.

finally, at the age of eight, i worked up the courage to shimmy the hole. my life was never the same.

the other side was like a white trash neverland for kids. there were approximately two adult pedophile carnies clogging up our atmosphere. we were free.

the most meaningful and memorable ride was a set of one-person swings that had rollers and swung you along, about six feet in the air. the track skirted the perimeter of the windowless boxy room. which means that as you were swinging happily downhill, you had to brace for the corners with your nimble little legs. if you didn’t keep both legs in front of you at all times, bracing for impact, you would literally smash face first into the wall. the carnie attendant waited at the end to snatch you out of your death capsule, though sometimes he was out on a smoke break and you had to break free on your own means.

i seriously believe that this was able to happen and take place for as long as it did because of the fact that kids are smart and we knew the awesome deal we had going for ourselves. speaking a word of this to adults after shimmying back through the portal would take it all away from us. i seriously believe this to be the case.

unfortunately some upton sinclair imposter probably wrote an expose’ on 80s chuck-e-cheese or maybe the carnies got a little too frisky, because i know that my whitetrash neverland with death mobiles and children running amok is no more.

only in my dreams.

Categories: RIP product/place I like
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