This post has two parts. The first part goes like this:
This week's show covers some of my favorite music from 1983. Why is that? It's because it's my birthday week & every year around this time since I started doing Self Help Radio I pick a year in my past, I started with 1968 in 2003, & I go up a year every year. So we're at 1983. You can see the playlists of the years I covered here, if you want.
That's the reason for the show, which will happen tomorrow at noon at the Self Help Radio website.
Also, I'll be doing the show in an especially annoying way, so you've been warned.
The second part of this post continues what I've been talking about this week, which is how I was in 1983. When I had finished my freshman year of high school, I had to deal with my best friend moving away. & if memory serves, I had already started helping out at the store which my mother's boyfriend owned, which was literally a block away from our apartments.
As for that summer, I don't remember too much. I do know I kept in touch with my friend Russell, we probably talked a lot on the phone, & I have memories of going to video arcades with my friend Kirk, who is no longer with us, having died in a drunk driving accident in 1987. Kirk was an interesting fellow, quite boisterous & loud. His mother would take us places & he'd sit in the front seat & just saying one profanity after another, his mother not reacting at all. It was quite odd. I remember he & I went to see the film War Games & at one scene where a female character came running on screen he said, for the whole theater to hear, "Boing, boing, boing," along with the bouncing of said character's breasts. It was mortifying but that's how he was & I enjoyed being around him. But I wouldn't say we were ever close, though we did stay friends all through high school.
What I do remember is that tenth grade was lonely. I just didn't really have any friends. I didn't enjoy my classes. I took Latin, mainly to irk my mother, who wanted me to take German, & I sat in the back corner as a kind of weird witness to much cooler kids doing life way better than I was. When they discovered I was the only one nearby who did the homework, they copied off me, although they still treated me like shit. & the woman who taught tenth grade English was actually the German teacher who had taught all my siblings but who never quite took to me. I remember one time in excitement showing her an Alan Moore Swamp Thing & she looked at me as though I were developmentally challenged.
We were studying Le Morte d'Arthur & she said she'd give extra credit for anyone to write an essay about the writer, Thomas Malory. Since I had been reading Mike W. Barr & Brian Bolland's Camelot 3000, which included an essay about Malory in its first issue, I volunteered to do it, & let's just say I liberally borrowed many whole paragraphs from Barr's essay. Mrs. Phillips was impressed but must have been suspicious when later assignments weren't quite as eloquent as something that came, you know, from an actual writer. It was really the only time in high school I plagiarized anything. & I felt both tremendous shame for doing that & also a weird sense of relief for pulling it off.
She actually had me read it out loud to the class! I didn't expect that.
Yeah, so as tenth grade ended, comics were pretty much the bright spot of my life. My little brother & I weren't close at all, I didn't really fit in with the rest of the family & slowly stopped going to weekend backyard things they always seemed to have planned, & I wasn't making friends at school. Would 1984 be better?
You'll have to wait till next year, but, spoiler alert: no, not really.
Hope you listen tomorrow!
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