Ah, the eighties...a madman in the White House carrying out secret and illegal wars, a greedy bastard in 24 Sussex trying to sell Canada out from under us, a war-monger in 10 Downing all too happy to do the bidding of the United States. No wonder some pine for the music...the politicians are the same.
Hunter Thompson wrote Generation of Swine for that decade. Bill Gibson penned his first cyber-punk book and had to actually explain to the interviewers that it was about living in Reagan's America. Those of us who actually knew how to read kind of figured that out by the end of the first chapter.
I got out of high school in 1982. Pot still had cool names...Maui Wowie, Acapulco Gold, and the king, Sensimillia...and hadn't gone metric yet. Hash was sold in grams, but pot was still in ounces.
You couldn't by a case of 24 beer in Saskatchewan yet. It was illegal to sell more than a dozen in a package, but you could buy as many dozens as you wanted. You also couldn't get beer in cans in Saskatchewan back then.
The muscle cars of the sixties, at least the more common ones, were dirt cheap. We bought them as beaters and destroyed them. You get a 300 horse power monster for $400 dollars. For $2500 you could get a Mustang Mach I that would smoke the back tires on command.
Sex couldn't kill yet, at least not in Saskatchewan. AIDS was something happening in San Francisco, New York, and Haiti. Even herpes was some far-off and exotic disease relegated to those in big American cities.
The music on the radio sucked, but that was okay because there were still plenty of indepently owned record stores around and the staff there were more than happy to order in imports from England and check back catalogues for old blues records.
