by Bryant Adkins
I am a child of the eighties. That is what I prefer to be called. The nineties can do without me. Grunge isn’t here to stay, fashion is fickle and “Generation X” is a myth created by some over-40 writer trying to figure out why people wear flannel in the summer. When I got home from school, I played with my Atari 2600. I spent hours playing Pitfall or Combat or Breakout or Dodge’em Cars or Frogger. I never did beat Asteroids. Then I watched “Scooby Doo.” Daphne was a Goddess, and I thought Shaggy was smoking something synthetic in the back of their psychedelic van. I hated Scrappy.
I would sleep over at friends’ houses on the weekends. We played army with G.I. Joe figures, and I set up galactic wars between Autobots and Decepticons. We stayed up half the night throwing marshmallows and Velveeta at one another. We never beat the Rubik’s Cube.
I got up on Saturday mornings at 6 a.m. to watch bad Hanna-Barbera cartoons like “The Snorks,” “Jabberjaw,” “Captain Caveman,” and “Space Ghost.” In between I would watch “School House Rock.” (“Conjunction junction, what’s your function?”)
On weeknights Daisy Duke was my future wife. I was going to own the General Lee and shoot dynamite arrows out the back. Why did they weld the doors shut? At the movies the Nerds got Revenge on the Alpha Betas by teaming up with the Omega Mus. I watched Indiana Jones save the Ark of the Covenant, and wondered what Yoda meant when he said, “No, there is another.”
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