After an awards show I usually have a lot of feelings. I mean, sure, I’m talking through the whole thing and shouting at my TV and giving hell and heck and high fives all over the place, but when it’s all over I am amped up and not ready to deal with those feelings and need to get my ass to sleep. Often I go to bed a little tipsy, on opulence and/or drink, and in the morning the intoxication from both has me waking with rage and exhilaration and flashes of the night before and opinions. Lots and lots of opinions. Like, who wore the best dress that everyone else is going to totally rag on because they are not fun jerks who just want everyone to be super lame. Or why Auto-tune and domestic violence are probably both getting a few too many Grammys. Or making up reasons for how producers decide which drug overdoses deserve the most fanfare.

Today my post-Grammy morning didn’t have flashes of the telecast, performances, gowns, hot pants. It began simply with Whitney Houston singing, “Saving All My Love For You”. But then. Something strange happened. It quickly morphed into “Sweetest Taboo” for a few bars, and then Cyndi and Tears for Fears and lyrics to songs I don’t even remember the titles of, singers that have faded from memory. Yes. It’s true. An entire K-tel television spot from my childhood playing in my head. 

I want to tell myself that I’m not getting old in a way that makes me long for things from my childhood. And aside from the freedom of being the financial responsibility of my parents I usually don’t wish I could go back to an “easier time,” don’t think every recycled tv show is ruining my perfect memories. I get excited about new things, am creepy and zeigeisty obsessed and don’t tell kids to get off my lawn because they have terrible taste, because I have bad taste too, but the emotional impact of this K-tel dreamscape buried me in nostalgia.

Why couldn’t I settle into the chesterfield and suck in snatches of pop music and not get ragey?  Now I mute every commercial. As a child even stupid commercials carried a sense of magic and excitement. They were possibility. I had my whole life ahead of me. Becoming an adult would bring great things and fun dance parties and love and romance and sweet taboos, whatever the hell they were. Fame and fortune and excitement and shiny record players that would lend an air of sophistication to the inevitable awards show parties I would come to host. Now ads are symbolic of the things a person can’t achieve and a lesson in critical thinking. 

Maybe all I need to take from this is that I should be ashamed that I don’t really understand how RRSPs work, but that I have vivid memories of a K-Tel tv ad from 1986. Or, perhaps, more importantly, that I can throw a pretty great awards show party, even without owning a record player. 

Oh yeah. Don’t get down on me, music purists and pretentious vinyl-lovers. Let me have my K-tel day. That argument is for another day.