This month’s header is the big tribute to the Summer of 1989, the best Summer I ever had in college. All the lessons I learned and mistakes I made in 1988 were perfected to make 1989 not suck. I did pretty well, having my new girlfriend Carrie in the picture was just the gravy.
I’ll go from left to right on these four pictures.
Number one is obviously the box to my favorite console game I was playing obsessively on the Nintendo NES I bought on an impulse. What happened originally was a guy on our wing at Mashuda received one as a present from his girlfriend. The time we should’ve spent studying instead of playing hockey, basketball, Duck Hunt and Super Mario Brothers, makes my head spin. I gave in to getting one during an expedition to gets José his own VCR at Highland or American (Milwaukee appliance stores). Super Mario Brothers 2 was something I rented a couple times from the nearby Best Buy. It was a very different game. No points, just a story. Carrie scored it for me as a 21st birthday present.
Number two is Technique, the cover to the worst New Order album I ever owned. It gets displayed because Carrie and I bought tickets to see them at Summerfest. They were one of four bands featured at an Alternative showcase featuring them, the Sugarcubes (pre-solo Bjork), PiL and the Violent Femmes. Since the latter went on last, we left in a hurry. I can only stand the Violent Cheese in small doses and if you throw in a homecoming, it’s unbearable. New Order though was much, much better than when I saw them three years earlier for their Brotherhood tour. I think they finally received the negative feedback we fans had been sending about their lack of stage presence.
Number three is Milwaukee’s best grocery store chain. A grocery store? Seriously? Well it was part of a weekly ritual every Friday. José and I would finish our Summer jobs, I would get cleaned up thanks to paint crew being dirty work. Phil would be waking up from sleeping all day (he had an overnight job). We’d all pile into Phil’s car with our coupons to buy groceries. I hated this kind of shopping growing up. As I was wading into the ocean of real adulthood, I began to enjoy it. Flex some independence muscles. Save some money. Phil had his own little mischief ritual of stealing candy from the huge Brach’s setup. How I hated that. Not just for the stealing but if Phil got busted, we lost our ride. I blame my cultural Catholicism’s built-in guilt for this riling my ire. Years ago, I reminded Phil of his shoplifting exploits. Obviously he had no memory of it. How does Pick n’ Save stack up against HEB? No idea. There’s 20-plus years of distance between them. I can safely say HEB clobbers anything in North Carolina.
Finally is Rolemaster. The D&D competitor Neal and Deb Baedke introduced me to in 1988. I liked it enough I spent my Christmas ’88 dough on the essential books as we continued to play in Neal’s Witch-King of Angmar campaign. RM was a more appealing game in the late Eighties. D&D was still known as AD&D and for GenCon ’89, TSR’s big release was the new AD&D 2nd Edition. I recall Phil buying a copy right away. I wasn’t impressed courtesy of the RM snobbery was now enrolled in. The game catered to the detail and realism gap D&D lacked then. Just this week though the new D&D 5th Edition basic set appeared. Things have come full circle. What about RM? I eventually grew disenchanted with the ruleset by the mid-Nineties. RM’s a great game if you keep it confined to its core but the publisher drowned the product in too many supplemental materials (aka the Companion books). It never had a very developed campaign world neither. Some of RM’s DNA did make its way into 3E D&D and Pathfinder; skills, Monks not sucking and I recall it was a bigger proponent of giving the monsters character levels.
There were other great times, those four things were chosen for being very specific aspects with the Summer of 1989.