USA's Night Flight 1981-1988

I have a fondness for myself. I mean I really always have liked myself and thought of myself as unique and special.

I hope you feel the same way about yourself.

A lot of self-nostalgia has been drifting back into my everyday consciousness lately. Last night I was sitting on the couch and all of a sudden I was flooded with a strange synesthesia of dreams, memories, and images of things that I'd neither dreamed or remembered. For a while I felt like I was having a stroke. But the more I think about it as this day goes on it was more of a show. A rare treat where past, present, future, reality, dream all blend together with no particular message or meaning other than to inform me that I was here on planet Earth for a while and a lot of good things happened. 

A blog I've been wanting to write for a long time has to do with USA's show Night Flight.

Night Flight is a variety show that originated on the USA Network. An eclectic mix of short films, cartoons, B movies, stand up comedy, documentaries, music videos and more, Night Flight was broadcast, in various incarnations, from 1981 to 1996. I mostly saw and connected with it in the earlier years. There was no MTV in the town I grew up in until the 1990's, and I was already gone, so most of what I knew about music videos I saw on Night Flight. The series originally ran from 1981–1988, for four hours on Friday and Saturday evenings. USA Up All Night starring Caroline Schlitt and Gilbert Gottfried (and, later, Rhonda Shear) replaced it in 1988.

Remembering the show I remember myself. How awkward those days were for me. These four hours on those nights really helped me see a world beyond the small town I grew up in where MTV was still disallowed unless you had a satellite feed and people like me weren't all that welcome. One of the videos I recall them playing for a while was Temple of the Lord by The Saints, a band they would never have played on the radio stations here. recently I remembered the song and have been listening to it quite a bit on Spotify.

A gestalt psychologist would encourage me to get down really deep into the Submerged Structure of the images and memories that came flooding back into my consciousness last night and I've spent most of the day doing that. I didn't enjoy those days. They were hard for me. The Marine Corps seemed to show up at my door one day and asked if I wanted to go somewhere else and I said yes. I'm shocked by how little any of these seems to have formed me as a person and how little I remember it. Not in the sense of it being repressed, but merely that it seems long ago and not very interesting. It wasn't what my unconscious was connecting to last night. 

Most of my life I have been awake all night and this was my introduction to that. Few people have ever had as much liberty and opportunity to explore those hours as I have. It's been a real blast. Not a stroke at all.

May 28, 2013: I can really dig what it was my unconscious was mining into now. Another tumultuous month. Deaths of friends, broken legs, cancer scares, dreadful illness. May has always been my favorite month. This year it hasn't been much fun at all. 




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