It is often said that people connect most with the music they heard during high school. At least, this is often said for me, because I went to high school from 1980-1984, and what a great music era that was. New Wave, Punk, Synth Pop, Goth: It was just a great time to be alive. MTV was brand new, and suddenly everyone had a visual interpretation of their newest song.

Recently, the loveliest of lovelies, Chelle B. re-discovered some of these wonderful 80’s videos on YouTube in an attempt to explain the 80’s to a couple of european “youngsters”. A mad nostalgia session ensued, in which I picked through my iPod, and my still very existent vinyl collection, coming up with the songs that shaped my teen years.

Of course, you could hunt through YouTube for these gems yourself, but I’ve collected my favorites here, in alphabetical order by band name. The links will open in a new window, so you can view each one and return to this page easily, or continue to wander through the vast archives of YouTube on your own.

This list is by no means all-inclusive. I will be updating it often, so bookmark the post and check back. Enjoy!

A

A-Ha
Take On Me
Hunting High and Low

ABC
The Look of Love
Poison Arrow

Adam & The Ants/Adam Ant
Goody Two Shoes
Stand And Deliver
Dog Eat Dog

Alphaville
Forever Young
Big in Japan

B

B-52’s
Rock Lobster
Planet Claire

Afrika Bambaataa & John Lydon
World Destruction

Toni Basil
Hey Mickey!

Bauhaus
Bela Lugosi’s Dead

Pat Benetar
Love Is A Battlefield

Berlin
The Metro

Big Country
In A Big Country

Blancmange
Living on the Ceiling

Bow Wow Wow
I Want Candy
Do You Wanna Hold Me?
Louis Quatorze

The Buggles
Video Killed the Radio Star

C

The Clash
Rock the Casbah
London Calling

Josie Cotton
Johnny Are You Queer? - no video for this one, sorry.

The Cult
Love Removal Machine

The Cure
A Forest
Just Like Heaven

D

Dead Kennedys
Holiday In Cambodia
California Ueber Alles

Dead Milkmen
The Thing That Only Eats Hipppies

Dead Or Alive
You Spin Me Round

Depeche Mode These are mostly TV appearances
Everything Counts
Somebody
Just Can’t Get Enough

Devo
Whip It

Thomas Dolby
She Blinded Me With Science
Airwaves
Europa And The Pirate Twins

Duran Duran
Planet Earth
Save A Prayer
Wild Boys
Rio

E

Echo and the Bunnymen
Lips Like Sugar

Eurythmics
Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)
Here Comes the Rain Again

F

The Fixx
One Thing Leads to Another
Saved by Zero
Sign of Fire

Flock of Seagulls
I Ran

Frankie Goes to Hollywood (FGTH)
Relax (a naughty version, but not THAT naughty)
Two Tribes
Welcome to the Pleasure Dome

G

Peter Gabriel
Shock The Monkey

The Go-Go’s
Head over Heels
Our Lips Are Sealed
Turn to You

Eddy Grant
Electric Avenue

H

Nina Hagen
New York, New York

Corey Hart
Sunglasses At Night

Murray Head
One Night In Bangkok

Heaven 17
Let Me Go
Penthouse & Pavement

Human League
(Keep Feeling) Fascination
Don’t You Want Me Baby?

I

Iam Siam
She Went Pop

Icicle Works
Whisper To A Scream

Billy Idol
Rebel Yell
White Wedding
Flesh For Fantasy
Dancing With Myself

INXS
What You Need

J

Japan
Gentlemen Take Polaroids

Howard Jones
No One Is To Blame
What Is Love?

K

Kajagoogoo
Too Shy

L

Cyndi Lauper
Girls Just Wanna Have Fun
Time After Time

M

M
Pop Muzik

Madness
Our House
It Must be Love

Malcolm McLaren
Buffalo Gals
Double Dutch

Men At Work
Down Under
Who Can it be Now?

Men Without Hats
Safety Dance
Pop Goes the World

Missing Persons
Destination Unknown
Words

Modern English
I Melt With You

Musical Youth
Pass The Dutchie

N

Nena
99 Luftballons

New Order
Blue Monday
True Faith

Gary Numan (Tubeway Army)
Cars
Are Friends Electric

O

Oingo Boingo
Nothing Bad Ever Happens To Me

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (OMD)
If You Leave
So In Love

P

Robert Palmer
Addicted To Love

Pet Shop Boys
West End Girls

Propaganda
P-Machinery

Psychedelic Furs
Love My Way

Re-Flex
The Politics Of Dancing

Real Life
Send Me An Angel

Rockwell
Somebody’s Watching Me

Romeo Void
Never Say Never

S

Peter Schilling
Major Tom - English version

Simple Minds
All The Things She Said
Alive And Kicking

Sisters of Mercy
Walk Away

Soft Cell
Tainted Love
Sex Dwarf

Spandau Ballet
True

Split Enz
I Got You

Rock This Town
Rock This Town

T

Talk Talk
It’s My Life

Tears for Fears
Mad World
Shout

Thompson Twins
Hold Me Now
You Take Me Up
Lies, Lies, Lies

Til Tuesday
Voices Carry

Timbuk 3
The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades

Bonnie Tyler
Total Eclipse Of The Heart

U

Ultravox
Dancing With Tears In My Eyes
Vienna
All Stood Still

V

The Vapors
Turning Japanese

W

The Waitresses
I Know What Boys Like

Wall of Voodoo
Mexican Radio

When In Rome
The Promise

Y

Yaz (Yazoo for you brits)
Only You
Don’t Go

Yello
I Love You
Vicious Games

Today I had the most frightening experience. I was at home, alone with the cat, and the Internet was out for over two consecutive hours. I thought I was going to die. Fortunately, after flat out abusing my browser’s refresh button while trying to access Pizza Hut’s online ordering system, I was able to connect and everything is going to be OK.

I couldn’t just sit there for two hours though. After a while, I had the most unusual sensation in my neck. To my great surprise, my head was turning away from the computer monitor. Just too weird.

There are actually…other things in here with me. Things that don’t provide access to a shoutbox and wholinkstome.com. Some of the things were in boxes, so I went through a few of them and reacquainted myself with life before the Information Age.

One of the things I stumbled across was a very old pouch of photographic negatives from Germany, which restored my sense of purpose as I was able to bring the things to the computer so I could look at them both at once. Most of the negatives appeared to be of pictures to which I have no physical copies, so I got to scanning.

And, by the time I figured out how to install my scanner on the Linux box, set up the appropriate software, and choose the negative to scan first, the Internet connection was restored and I was saved. Don’t you want to date me?

At any rate, that pic up there is me after having just turned 18, hanging out at a costume party in Stade, Germany. The red splotches all over the place are from the negative, which apparently didn’t enjoy sitting in a paper pouch for 22 years, but then again, neither would I.

When I was a little boy, I wanted nothing more in the whole wide world then to become a gymnast. I think it was mostly Nadia Comaneci’s perfect performances during the Montreal Olympics in 1976 that inspired me. I loved watching the male gymnasts on the pommel horse, and I know what you’re thinking, but I was 10. They were like superheroes. I practiced turning cartwheels and doing front handsprings in the recreation room, or out in the yard. And I begged my parents to let me take lessons.

This was before soccer moms. Officially.

The day of my first gymnastics lesson, my mom brought me to the school gym and stood along one wall with the rest of the mothers as we tumbled to our hears content under the supervision of the high school’s gymnastic coach, who was slumming it on the weekends.

Predictably, the class consisted of about 12 girls and two boys. In the 1970’s, I’m sure our masculinity came into question right off the bat, even at the age of 10. Or maybe it was a matter of asserting alpha male authority. Whatever the reason, it took the other boy, who was a lot bigger than I was, about five minutes before he lost interest in cartwheels and gained interest in kicking me in the stomach.

We were a good Lutheran family, and I knew all about turning the other cheek. Plus, with all those adults watching, it would only be a matter of minutes before someone stepped in and broke it up.

That, at least, proved to be true. Before long, the instructor pulled the kid off me and class resumed, just as if nothing had happened. Except, there was me, looking at my mother, looking at the gymnastics instructor, looking for a sign from anyone that some boy didn’t just get away with beating the snot out of me in front of 10 adults.

I guess relating a sense of betrayal at this point is a bit dramatic, but I’m going to do it anyhow, because that’s how I felt. So I sat in the middle of the big, blue tumbling mat and cried.

Before long, my mom was using that forced whisper every kid dreads. “Get up this very second and stop crying or you’re going to get a spanking when we get home.”

In this case, I think the word “spanking” gets an F for being insufficiently descriptive. When we got home, I was ordered to remove all my clothes, lay on the bed and grab the slats in the headboard. In the meantime, Mom retrieved Dad’s infamous black belt and the phone so she could call her friends to talk about what a disappointment I was while she beat my backside black and blue.

I’d like to say this was a singular occurrence, but the first memory I have of my mother was having my face slapped at age three for dipping a finger into the home churned butter to see what it tasted like. She’d done the same thing just prior.

Obviously, my parents were firm believers in corporal punishment. It was my dad who handed out most of the spankings, but it was always my mom who instigated the plan. What bothers me most looking back isn’t that my parents spanked me, it’s that half the time I didn’t understand why.

Mom’s favorite disciplinary implement was a wooden spoon kept in the kitchen. One day, when some of the neighborhood wives were over frosting each other’s hair, Mom reached for the drawer that contained the spoon, and I burst into tears, begging her to tell me what I’d done wrong. She, and the other women, laughed and laughed.

Now that I’m older, I realize it wasn’t discipline that Mom loved so much as it was moral superiority. From the time I was in middle school, she kept a notebook of everything I’d ever done wrong, and the same for my sister, in case, in her words, she “ever needed to press charges against us.” Coming home from dinner with college friends one night, she told us: “Boy, I told my friends about your behavior. They said if they had kids like that, they’d slap them silly.”

The only thing in the world my mom enjoyed more than telling everyone who would listen what rotten children she had was telling us. Eventually, we started giving her reasons to look down on us, and the family just kind of fell apart. My sister and I hated both of our parents, and each other. And my parents, who as it turns out couldn’t stand each other, presented a solid and isolationist front.

The year after my partner, Derek, died of AIDS related complications, my mom and grandmother sent me the deed to a burial plot for my birthday.

Our family consists of broken people. I was the kid who got beat up everyday, and turned out to be the one with the most serious mental health issues. My sister is the devil personified, who screams, swears at and actually threatens her husband in front of their children. And Mom is Lucy Van Pelt to everyone’s Charlie Brown. She loves to set us up and watch us fall.
It took a long time to realize that Mom really wasn’t treating me or my sister differently than she treated anyone else. It just felt different because, well, she was our mom. At least in theory.

She didn’t hold us when we cried, or try to calm our fears. She just grew angry and threatened. She didn’t like it when we had problems, because problems didn’t fit into her world view of what a family should be like. So, when I was being bullied on a daily basis, rather than try to communicate with me, she dragged me to a therapist and let him tell her how I was feeling. Then she blamed me for the expense.

So, several years ago, when Mom offered to help support me through school, I was stunned. I tried to tell myself that, as I’d matured as a person, so had she. Maybe she really had my best interests at heart.

I think it took about three weeks before she started asking for itemized lists of my expenses (down to the last penny), and threatening to withhold assistance if I couldn’t find a way to get into the welfare system. Foodstamps at the very least.

Since this, Mom has been a curious mixture of support and retribution. I guess she feels I need to work for the money, outside of school, so she gives me mountains of useless tasks to accomplish. In her mind, Social Security is this huge bucket of money, and that anyone who suffers from more than a headache can just walk into a DSHS office and get support. This is especially strange given she’s a staunch Republican, and the “welfare state” is something she stands firmly against.

I’ve been squirming on the end of her hook now for three years, and it finally got to be too much. Last quarter, when I was hospitalized, Mom spent hours on the phone with one of my best friends, A. It turns out, the thing she was least interested in was how I was doing. It was much more important to her that A. understand why none of this was Mom’s fault and how I was really getting what I deserved.

“To think, he’s almost 40 and I have to help him with his rent!”

Of course, she didn’t have to. She offered in the first place, but it satisfied her sense of control to believe I had no other options.

This past quarter has been tremendously difficult. Not just academically, but trying to get back into the swing of things after a total psychotic breakdown. And trying to do it with a very tough schedule, knowing all the while my breakdown was very public and on campus, so everyone around me really is watching; it’s no longer a delusion. Add to that a sudden change of heart from my mother, who arbitrarily decided my dad was going to support me financially, at the very last minute.

By last minute, I mean four days before rent was due and one week before finals. I’ve been having a hell of a time with school, anyway, but add to that impending homelessness and it turned out to be simply more than I could deal with. My brain…folded.

First, I made absolutely sure Mom wasn’t going to help me out with the bills. Once we were really clear on that point, I came to the conlusion I couldn’t think about both where to suddenly come up with a thousand dollar and how to solve differential equations, or deal with quantum mechanics. I dropped out of school.

The next day, Mom deposited money into my checking account.

I can’t do this any longer. In retrospect, it was probably a bad idea for me to attempt school again so soon, anyway. The added stress of never knowing whether the support I’ve been promised will be there or not is too much of a burden.

I don’t blame my mom, no matter what the tone of this post has been thus far. It’s been a long time since I stopped thinking of her as evil and started thinking of her as broken. But I’m broken, too. If she never sent me another dollar again as long as she lives, I’d be fine with that, if only she could just be a mensch and act like she was on my side. But she can’t, and I understand that.

Today was the day I was supposed to sit for my three physics finals. I wasn’t doing well this quarter, but I was getting by, and it’s a little bit of a bummer to know most of this academic year was completely wasted.

I’m not giving up on school. If possible, I’ll move back to Bellingham and start at Western in the Fall. Probably not physics, though. I think what I really need now is an area of study that is both enriching as well as cathartic, so I’ll probably go for an English degree and concentrate on writing. I’m not giving up on Physics, either. I just think that’s something I need to do by myself for now.

All year, I’ve been feeling like that little boy grabbing the edge of the bed and waiting for the belt to strike. And while it’s not my mom’s fault that I have mental problems that enhance that particular sense of helplessness, it’s not my fault either. Once again, I need to set my own limits and control my own life. That’s a lesson worth way more than any piece of paper, anyhow.

It’s almost 80 degrees in Seattle. The sky is blue and scantily clad people are all over the streets. This is July weather, as far as we’re concerned in the good old Pacific Northwest. As much as we bitch about the rain, we just can’t handle hot weather. With all that thermal radiation coming off the pavement, the windows, and all these beautiful old stone buildings, people start to cook and pretty soon, insanity runs amok.

Take just now, for instance. I was lounging in my living room with the cat, when angry voices shot in through the window. I went to see what was up as someone shouted “Hit him! Hit him!”. A couple of cars had pulled up to the corner across from my window and about five people had gotten out to, apparently, beat some poor kid.

I don’t know why. They hit him a couple of times, everyone talked nasty to each other, and then the people got back into their cars and sped away, leaving the kid (I say kid, maybe 20 or so) sitting on the sidewalk, bleeding.

“Ah, that takes me back,” I thought to myself as I dial 911. The 911 dispatcher patched me in to a cruiser directly, and I gave them a description of what went on, the models of the cars and the license plate number of one of them. Calling 911 now is a novelty. One I could gladly do without, of course, but there was a time when calling 911 was almost a weekly occurrence.

I shared a house for a number of years with a group of friends in the Wallingford neighborhood of Seattle. Our house was right on the freeway, and the exit ramp almost connected with our driveway. In other words, a total freak threshold.

One time, around midnight, a complete stranger burst through the front door, falling down drunk, and offered to sell us cocaine. It turns out, he’d wrapped his enormous car around a telephone pole a couple of blocks down and was looking to get rid of incriminating evidence before the cops showed up. One of my housemates managed to shove him back our through the door with a crutch while another one called the cops.

Another time, we were sitting on our front porch with a cooler of beer, just watching the cars go by. We became immediately aware that one of the cars wasn’t like the others as the car veered to the left, while its entire rear right wheel went the other direction. Mostly we noticed this because the underside of the car burst into flames as it was dragged across the pavement at around 40 miles per hour directly before the car slammed into the off-ramp railing.

As too often happens with vortices of doom, eventually the loonies made their way in, thanks to a couple of really poor decisions by the people who signed the lease. First, there was the paranoid schizophrenic who had developed an intricate plot involving the various communist based political parties. Naturally, they were all trying to kill him and, just as naturally, he eventually decided we were communists too, which was really neat, especially when he marched off into the night, threatening to come back with a shotgun.

And I can’t forget the crazy bum who, for a time, lived in the garage with his insanely untrained and kind of vicious dog. One day, someone said, “Hey. Whatever happened to the crazy bum with the vicious dog?” We traipsed down to the garage, only to find he’d moved out. Several years later, a friend would call the house desperately after hearing that the crazy bum with the vicious dog had called in a bomb threat to the police. Of the house, naturally. I’d write “of us”, but paranoid schizophrenic with intent to kill taught me a valuable lesson and I’d already moved out.

Really, though, when it comes to people ganging up on someone smaller and weaker, I have to bring up the middle-aged filipina woman with the nice sandals.

One night, coming home from a hard day’s work at Hell On A Stick, I arrived just as it was getting dark. I remember that because the porch light was on, highlighting a particularly attractive pair of women’s sandals. “Funny, those look like the kind of sandals a middle-aged asian woman might wear,” I thought, which is silly because I’ve met a surprising number, though statistically insignificant, I admit, of middle-aged asian women and as far as I can tell, they all wear different shoes.

I opened the door to a living room surprisingly devoid of housemates. There were seven of us living there, and we all had different schedules, so it was usually three deep 24 hours a day. There, however, directly in front of the door, wearing a surprisingly floral dress and screaming into the phone in what I believe was Tagalog, was a barefoot middle-aged asian woman.

Well, huh.

She didn’t seem bothered to see me, and she was the furthest thing from threatening I could possibly imagine, standing probably a little under five feet. So I grabbed a seat and opened a book until she finished her phone call. Which she did, and then ran to the door as fast as she possibly could, slamming it behind her. A split-second later, I heard the click clack of her sandals rushing down the front steps.

I walked out to the front porch to see what all the fuss was about. That’s when I noticed what must be her car, obviously broken down right in front of our house, in the right turn lane. The woman stood by her car and paced frantically back and forth, until she - and consequently I - caught sight of a black stretch limousine rolling slowly up the street behind her car with the lights off.

The limousine stopped parallel to the woman’s car, and she looked about frozen with fear. Two men in matching suits and, I swear, sunglasses, got out of the back of the limousine and walked toward the woman. They began arguing and slapped the woman across the face, which was when I went back inside and dialed 911. Apparently, just when I went inside, a tow truck had pulled up as well. The person on the other end of the woman’s phone call had called them, presumably.

The largest blondest man I have ever seen unfolded himself from the obviously too small cabin of the tow truck just as the men in suits reached inside them to apparently draw weapons, by the time I had reached with the phone cord back out to the front porch, not only was the scene bathed in the front lights of the two truck, but every light in every house along the street was on and people were coming out on their front porches. Inside, roommates condensed like water vapor.

“What’s with the asian woman?”

“Dunno. She knocked on the door and screamed at us while making telephone gestures. We let her use the phone.”

“Where were you guys?”

“In the basement. She’s really loud.”

Tow truck guy, who I swear must have been almost seven feet tall, escorted the woman back to his truck and, now realizing there were lots and lots of witnesses, all of whom were scribbling down license plate numbers as fast as they possibly could, suggested the men might like to be somewhere else very quickly. They obliged.

To this day, I have no idea what the hell that was all about. I remember that, for a couple of weeks afterward, we snuck in and out of the house like thieves and left lights off, absurdly fearing that the men in the limousine would come back for revenge against the people who prevented their crime. That lost its dramatic edge fairly quickly though, so we got over it.

But that’s what today reminded me of. The people in the cars sped away and left the guy nursing a fat lip on the curb. The police got here pretty quickly, asked the guy if he was OK, and then sped off in the direction the cars had gone in. I don’t know what gets into people that they would just turn on someone like a pack of rabid dogs, in full view of anyone who happens to be within a block radius.

Well, a lot of stupidity is the cause, obviously. But beyond that, I mean. I swear it’s the heat. Exposed to direct sunlight, we start to shrivel almost instantly.