Saturday!

With the recent passing of The King of Pop, we lose an important icon from the decade of my childhood, the 1980's. I have a love/hate relationship with the 80's. I love them because Jeanne was born in 1982; because I had some pretty respectable collections of Lego, M.U.S.C.L.E. , Transformers, and Masters of the Universe toys; and also because in 1987, I first started collecting comic books, a hobby that would continue until 2002, thus stunting my development as a productive member of society.
But I also hate lots of things about the 80's. Even as a child, I used to hate the way people looked back then. Everything was ridiculously ugly, all poofy and pastel. I hated a lot of the popular music of the time (I had no way of listening to punk and all that stuff) , and while I did enjoy watching Michael Jackson videos on MTV, exposure to all of the cheesy hair metal like Poison and soft-rock wussies like Richard Marx used to make me hate music altogether.
Cold War paranoia was still going on, and along with other Reagan-wrought propaganda like "The War on Drugs", there was a lot to scare little kids. Add this to my being in Catholic school for most of the decade, my parents divorcing, living on government cheese for a couple years, and my uncle killing himself, and you might understand why the 80's were not my favorite decade.
There were things that sucked about the 90's too, of course, but I always felt like that was my decade. I was comfortable with the way things looked and sounded back then, and it was a noticeable change around 1989 when the Soviet Union broke up and the Berlin Wall came down. I was too young to really understand the politics behind the first Gulf War, and was too interested in comics, girls, and Nintendo to care much about anything else. Most of what I knew about the world came from Mad Magazine.

That's why I say that the 80's are like the new 60's, because retro style just works that way. You don't want things to be the way they were when your parents came of age, because after all, they are the people who fucked you up! So you look to the decade before your parents were your age, and marvel at how awesome things seemed then. That's what we did as young people in the 90's, and that will be what the youth of the 2010's are going to do.

But then, what do I know? I just run off at the keyboard sometimes...