Everything makes me nostalgic, and weepy lately. Something about 80's week on VH-1 has really gotten to me. My emotions are easily bruised right now, anyway, probably due to dragging all my old psychological baggage out into the daylight where I can examine it and send the unusable bits to the dumpster for good. I'm not having a good time in therapy, I'll tell you that, but that's how it goes; change isn't painless. So here I am feeling a tad delicate about life in general, and then cable tv puts my youthful follies on display.

That's me in 1983, 1984, 1987, and 1988. I started out with pink hair, shaved it all off, shaved just the sides, ratted it high, dyed it bi-weekly, cut it into cool angles, and then went Blondie blonde. Between these cuts there were other styles. I kept the gothic/mohawk look going as late as 1989, but I usually got bored with shaving after a few weeks. In 1989 I moved to Nashville and didn't cut my hair for four years. Now *that* was radical for me.

I've taped the 80 "greatest" videos of the 80's according to VH-1. They were actually the most popular videos, which is entirely different. I don't understand some of the song choices for some of the groups. I saw U2's "Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" a million times more than "Where The Streets Have No Name." I would much rather have taped videos by the Pixies, Siouxie Sue, Black Flag, or the Avengers than Godley and Creme, Guns N' Roses, Toni Basil, or Pat Benatar. Godley and Creme? Please. And I seriously thought I would go mad from hearing Pat Benatar and Bonnie Tyler's big hits played ad nauseum on the radio in 1983 so I don't ever want to listen to "Love is a Battlefield" again. Come to think of it, I'm deeply grateful "Total Eclipse of the Heart" is not on that tape.

Oh, the 80's! How I loved them. I can appreciate how corny and kitsch it looks now, but even at the time we reveled in the absurdity of the big shoulders and big hair. We wanted everything to be oversized or undersized, huge hair and spandex pants, the more contrast the better. I liked the music better than any music I'd heard before, and I loved synthesizers and guitar rock equally. It used to matter, you know, people used to seriously debate whether drum machines were killing rock'n'roll. You could like Yaz or you could like the Meat Puppets. It was seriously uncool to like any music from the 70's; most of us had grown up with arena rock and hated it. The 50's were okay, the availability of cheap vintage clothing from thrift stores meant kids were starting to reclaim the fashions of 30 years earlier, but it wasn't the mania it is now. It took a lot of nerve to wear gender-specific formalwear when all around you were androgynous hairspray addicts or black-clad punks. I combined everything, wearing black jeans, silver skull earrings, artfully torn t-shirts, studded wrist bracelets, and leather two-tone winklepickers.

I know. Hard to believe. But I looked ultra cool at the time.

I guess I'm just a little sad about having "my" decade be positioned for reclaimation by the youth of today or tomorrow. I don't usually feel bad about that sort of thing. Like change, aging isn't painless. But I would just as soon not be confronted with it at the moment if it's going to make me miss my younger days and think of them in rosy terms. They weren't rosy. I'd rather remember how it really was, with fond but clear memories, and then go right back to enjoying where I am here and now.

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