It seems to me I've been looking back the past couple of days with sadness, so I thought I'd talk about things I loved in 1983. There must've been some, yes?
Indeed. For example, I loved laughing. I loved dumb comedy of all kinds & I especially loved David Letterman. It was not uncommon for me to stay up late (he came on at 11:30pm in the central time zone) & be groggy the next day, but armed with his best bits. Remember the whole "Billie Jean" "chair is not my son" letter? I laughed about that forever.
I loved listening to music, & especially to the radio, although at times I found it a bit frustrating. I remember one lazy afternoon, I kept track of everything they played on one station - I believe it was "the Eagle" - & discovered they played a few songs every hour. That was disillusioning.
But I kept listening to the Beatles - one great thing that happened was there was a syndicated show that year called Ringo's Yellow Submarine hosted by the dour one himself which I used to tape when it aired on Sunday mornings. I didn't yet have all the Beatles albums, & it was a treat to hear stuff I had never heard before.
As I've already mentioned, so much new stuff was coming in from all sides. My friend Russell became obsessed with the debut from Big Country, & I ended up buying the cassette at the mall, & loved it. I saw Elvis Costello on Letterman do songs from Imperial Bedroom & was shocked to find it & his new one, Punch The Clock, in the discount cassette bin at the same mall record store. While I didn't buy much music then, I did record lots from the radio. I might still have some of those tapes, if they still play, thirty years later.
It's fair to say I loved my mother, then. She kept me tied to her apron strings well into my adolescence. If you were to see how weirdly devoted yet not devoted her other sons are to her now, you'd have a sense of her way of dealing with her boys, but I hadn't yet begun to see through her particular ways. That would come later, & I suppose I'm still not entirely free of that.
There's a particular memory I have of that time. You'll recall Ronald Reagan was President then & he was constantly talking about nuclear war. I had a particular morbid fascination for a post-nuclear world, & even wrote a dungeon adventure for my D&D group that took place in our high school after a nuclear war, with all the teachers & some of the other students turned into monsters. I never finished it, though - I didn't really finish things back then - but I did share it with Scott before he moved away, & he approved.
Anyway, I recall walking from my apartment to the comic store after seeing something on television Reagan said about surviving a nuclear attack which I knew of course was stupid, & I thought to myself, "If I knew we were about to die, I'd want to be with my mother." That thought seems so odd to me now - when things are going wrong, the last place I'd want to be is with her. This is true: when I hurt my back in 2002, & had to wait for surgery, & was out of work for three months, I never told her how bad it was, or that I needed spinal surgery, until afterwards, because I knew she'd come to Austin to make me miserable. She loves to tell that story, even today, about how she didn't believe me.
Did I love my family? I might have said then that I did, but I didn't really know them. The divide between us was growing, & I no longer did things like play basketball with my little brother. More & more I spent time with myself, & having things to love makes that time worthwhile.
& of course I loved comic books. Oh shit, I loved them. It was like a secret I had that very few people knew or cared about. I am so grateful that there wasn't an internet or Youtube back then because there would hundreds of videos by me arguing dumb things about comic books. I would've had to have spent the better part of my adulthood deleting them.
Back then I wanted to write comics. I drew some, I'm not great but I can draw, but I really wanted to write. I didn't have any good ideas, I had no conception of plot, I never knew an artist to collaborate with me - but I wanted to write comics!
Recently a dog-walking friend seemed aghast that I like "super hero movies," & I told her that I've never discriminated between art forms. If I like it, I like it, be it comic or classic novel, be it art on a wall or art on a seven-inch record. Comics helped with that. The fact that so many people (Bill Maher notwithstanding) love them, that graphic novels are taught in college, that people like Chris Ware are hailed for their genius, makes me feel a little vindicated, but you know what? Even if none of this were true, I'd still love comics.
Tomorrow I'll talk about how 1983 ended for me, & it involves comics, too. Surprise, surprise.
No comments:
Post a Comment