A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...

When MTV was still cool and slashers ruled the day...

It’s 1986 and you can probably find me bopping around the run-down shack that my grandmother was desperately trying to keep habitable, portable cassette player in hand (we couldn’t afford a fancy Walkman after all) listening to Madonna, Janet Jackson, the Jets, Van Halen, or some other Top 40 jam. I didn’t have all those tapes, of course. I owned a couple Maddona cassettes and a Jets single, but mostly I had to record songs off the radio if I wanted to listen to them back later.

I spent my nights watching television long after I was supposed to be in bed. Sometimes we got pirated HBO and I would find myself taking in child-friendly entertainment like A Nightmare on Elm Street or The Hitchhiker. I remember when we first got a hand-me-down VCR and I could watch movies any time I wanted to… I felt like I’d just been handed a million dollars.

Then I somehow got my hands on a Tandy Color Computer… followed by a Sega Master System and a Nintendo Entertainment System. I still don’t know how I got these things. We were dirt poor. My mom or one of my uncles probably bought them for me. I didn’t live with my mother as a kid. She was in the army off in Germany and we didn’t have much of a relationship at the time, but I think she was sending money back every once in a while to my grandmother who was raising me in order to help with things.

I spent so many hours with those devices. I had no siblings (yet), no real friends, and I was so smart in school that it really just caused the other kids to pick on me more than anything else. Wearing early-1970s hand-me-downs in the mid-1980s probably didn’t earn me any social currency, either. So I lived both my outer life and my inner life within music, television, movies, and video games. My friends were Mario, Luigi, Alex Kidd, and Ryu from Ninja Gaiden. My role models were Jesus (yeah, we’ll get to that at some point), Superman, and Jean-luc Picard. Being fatherless, I learned much of my self-concept as a man from those characters, which in some ways was good, but in others was pretty unhelpful because those are fictional characters (except for maybe Jesus the human?) and not real people.

So suffice it to say that much of my self-identity—my inner child, in fact—is firmly entrenched in that place and time. I find these pieces of vintage media and entertainment have become a gateway to expression and emotional understanding that heretofore had felt inaccessible to me. As I return to these treasured stories, songs, and games, I’m also recovering the pieces of myself that have been scattered throughout the decades by trauma, my own poor choices, and the ill intent of others.

So it’s there I’ll continue to go in an attempt to find myself again… if there’s enough left of me in these images, words, and sounds to be found, that is.

And you get to come along too! Isn’t that fun?

Please. Hold your applause.