The Beloved 80'S
I have so many songs from the 80's. I write primarily on guitar now, but throughout that decade, I used the grandfather of all computer programs for music creation- Notator/Creator. All the music on this page is copied from old cassettes. Listen at your own risk for fun :)
My sisters and I used to walk around the neighborhood carrying this huge boom box on our shoulders.
I was writing this kind of stuff for a while. I had some great friends who were also great players and I worked at a music store with a guy who had a home studio
When the drum machine, midi and the like became "the thing" back then, I did this stuff until I got meh about it.
Ah, the 80's... I was in my twenties at the time and that alone should tell you a lot. We all have stories and if you're older like me you have A LOT of them. When I'm asked to tell my story at an AA meeting, there are 3 basic questions I need to answer- what it was like, what happened, and what it's like now. To this day, I'm still mining for that truth. In 1985, "I got my GED in a psych ward." is just one story and I have a pewter plate my parents had engraved for me when I got my certificate. Depending on how you look at it, my life could appear to be all treatment programs and trauma. But it's not. It's a life, probably much like yours, made up of stories strung together. And they all matter. Together they help make some sense of things.
I have the plate on my plate shelf which makes it an actual plate shelf.
PROCESS STUDIO was a loft space in Chicago that was both a theater and a recording studio that Kerry and I built from nothing. I wrote a lot about this era in my stories. It was one of the best times of my life, the absolute highlight of not only the 80's, but my entire time on the planet. It cannot be described, you had to live it and a lot of amazing people were right there, living it with us. However, I did not see this clearly at the time. I didn't see anything clearly and I wish to God I had. If only I could relive it, but that's the thing about life as a human, I can't.
I had no frame of reference at that age. There was a lot I didn't know, much less understand about myself, my life growing up, and the world. I wasn't "all there". If ya know what I'm saying? And it wasn't just drugs and alcohol. It was life in a mad scramble just to be ok. Everything I did was to medicate how I was feeling. Every drink, every drug, every move I made was a desperate clamor to stop the bleeding. I knew there was something very wrong. But if you had asked me what it was, I couldn't have told you.
The "DEBRA Fell in the Fishbowl" show.
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I don't have much in the way of memorabilia, relics from the past. I lost nearly everything when my basement apartment flooded, the one I moved into when my life fell apart. I was grabbing things out of the water as they floated around. I had one big box which had pictures, all that stuff, and it sat immersed in water like a sunken ship. We didn't have plastic tubs like we do now- the plastic tub generation. I opened up the soggy box but then hoisted it straight into the dumpster without ever really going through it. Honestly, I gave up. I didn't possess the will to care. The only clothes and things I didn't lose were in the egg. I had this gigantic Leggs egg Stores used them to display nylons. I had dragged it home from the alley after work one night at 2 am. It was my "dresser". Since it was plastic and tall, it was about the only thing that withstood the water. I barely did.
I wrote a bunch in that basement but not about what I was really going through. I don't think I could have.
I was so drunk most of the time. Vodka. And beer of course but I didn't consider that to be "real" drinking.
Songs have always saved me. It helps me stay sober, but it won't get me sober.
Shortly thereafter, I went to treatment at Hazelden in Minnesota. All I brought was a backpack with some sweatpants and a ton of quarters to be able to call someone to come get me if I decided treatment just wasn't for me. ​​But I was never going to escape myself. And no one gets to leave earth without having made a lot of "mistakes". And if you don't think you have, well power to you, I guess. You found a way to live in your own bubble of protection from knowing the lies you tell yourself. One of the most difficult days of my life was when I no longer could justify my behavior with anything anyone else did, even if it was to me personally, even if it didn't seem fair, even if it really hurt. It just stopped working. I did what I did. And fuck, it's fucking hard to look in the mirror. People in the bubble will do anything to stay in the bubble. I get it. It might be safer, easier, maybe, but the bubble sucks. I never did make it back to Chicago, except to visit. I don't know what happened to the egg.
