You wake up one day and realize you've been sent back to the 80s...now what?

I'm a nostalgic guy who looks back fondly on his younger years.

The music to which I listen is one example of this. I have many modern/semi-current tracks in my library, and I try to listen to new stuff all the time, but there's no denying that my tastes lean very heavily toward the 1980s.

For every Harry Styles song I own, you'll find 30 by The Police, 25 by Men at Work, 20 by Duran Duran, and heck, probably five by Kajagoogoo.

I follow quite a few retro 80s accounts on Twitter because I enjoy the cultural memories they feature. One of those accounts recently posted a question that caught my interest: If you woke up one day and realized you had been transported back to the 80s, what would you do?

If you are younger than 33, the first thing you would do is wonder why you had been sent to a time before you were even born.

But if you are 53 like me, this becomes something to ponder. If I was sent back in time 40 years, and if, let's say, I was only allowed to stay there a few hours before returning to the present, what would be my priorities?

Here are the five things I would probably do:

(1) Sit and talk with my mom and dad (and if they happen to be visiting, my sisters and brother): Kids, once your parents are gone, you can't believe the things you would do to see them again. They would wonder why 13-year-old me had suddenly taken such a deep interest in having a protracted conversation with them, but it would be amazing. The first thing I would do is walk into the living room and talk with them.

(2) Head to the arcade: I would have to spend at least a half hour at Galaxy Gardens, our local game room. I expended untold amounts of time and money there and it was wonderful. I could do without people smoking indoors like they used to, but hey, that's the price you pay for the privilege of time travel.

(3) Turn on the TV: It wouldn't take long to cruise through the 36 channels we had from Continental Cablevision, so I would stop at MTV and watch some of those classic music videos when they were still fresh and new.

(4) Round up my friends: This would involve actually going to their houses and/or calling their landlines (gasp!), but any combination of Matt, Kevin, Jason, Mike, Todd, etc. I could rouse would be worth the effort. Even if we just headed down to the railroad tracks and hung out (it was much more fun than it sounds, believe me).

(5) Enjoy the freedom of being without a smartphone: I could easily do this now by simply leaving my phone at home, but it wouldn't be quite the same. There was something appealing about a world in which you were mostly unreachable most of the time and everyone was OK with that. As miraculous as the iPhone is as a technological innovation, it also comes with hidden shackles I wouldn't mind shedding for a few hours.

HONORABLE MENTION: 1983 was three years before I started dating Terry, so I might ride my bike to Robert Street on the other end of Wickliffe and see if I could catch a glimpse of her at home. This sort of stalking was frowned upon even then, however, so it might also lead to me spending a few hours in an early-80s jail cell.

The cocktail table arcade game in the living room

My wife, a gift-giver extraordinaire, bought me this for Christmas. It is an authentic, cocktail table-style arcade game unit that includes several versions of Pac-Man along with my second-favorite video game of all time (Galaga), as well as Galaxian and both versions of Dig Dug.

It has been a hit in our house from the moment it was unveiled Christmas morning.

Actually, I should clarify that it has been a hit mostly with me, Terry, and Melanie's boyfriend Jason. We're the ones who play it the most.

It should also be clarified that, while it's technically "mine," Terry logs the most time on it. She has always been very good at Dig Dug. Over the last couple of months, she has progressed to expert level.

I enjoy it not only because it's so much fun, but also because it takes me back to the years when I was a regular visitor to our local game rooms...say roughly 1981 through 1984.

I remember Tuesday nights at Food and Games (later Fun and Games) at Willo Plaza where, for a $3 cover charge, there were unlimited credits on all games in the arcade and you could play them to your heart's content for three hours, no quarters/tokens needed.

We also frequented Up to Par and the game room closest to home, Galaxy Gardens.

Whenever I wanted to go to Galaxy Gardens and lacked the funds to support my video game habit, I would simply stop at the home of one of the customers on my paper route and collect whatever money they owed. For those who received the newspaper every day, the amount was $3.10. I could last a full 90+ minutes at Galaxy Gardens with three bucks, depending on the games I played, so it worked out nicely.

That's assuming I remembered to mark the customer from whom I collected as "paid" in my records once I got home. That wasn't always the case, which led to more than a few embarrassing visits to collect from customers who had already paid me that week.

Anyway, my quest on our new machine is to get to 200,000 in Galaga. Once you get past level 20 or so in that game, it is nothing but chaos. The best gamers back in The Day could get way past that, but it's a challenging and worthy goal for my 51-year-old self.

Well, that and breaking the habit of trying to insert a token into the machine when I want to start a new game. Even 40 years later, that's a tough adjustment to make.

Four things I miss

This is what old people do, you know: Talk about the way things used to be and how it was so much better back in their day.

I don't know how much "better" things were when I was younger, but I do know there are things I miss. For example:

Game Rooms

Or "video arcades." Whatever you want to call them. These were places where you could bring a couple of dollars, buy some tokens, and happily spend the next few hours playing Pac Man, Donkey Kong, Frogger, Centipede, etc. And now they're mostly gone.

Well, there are still arcades around at malls and amusement parks and places like that. But there are a lot fewer of them, and the ones that do exist are filled with expensive games I don't want to play.

When I had a newspaper route, I would regularly stop by one of my customer's houses on my way to the game room and collect their biweekly bill. That amounted to $3.10 for those who received The News-Herald every day, which was more than enough to fund an afternoon at Galaxy Gardens, the game room that was a 5-minute bike ride from my house.

Now home video game systems have advanced to the point that there's no need for game rooms. Which is OK. I just miss putting on my painter's cap (adorned with buttons representing various early-80s bands) and heading to the game room so I can try and beat my high score on Defender.

Johnny Carson

Hey, I love Jimmy Fallon. And Letterman. And Craig Ferguson. They're all great, as far as I'm concerned. But Johnny was a staple. He showed up on your TV every night, walking onstage to the same music and, to some extent, telling the same jokes. And it was great. It was something you could count on.

But "The Tonight Show" has moved on (as it should) and Johnny himself is gone. Which is kind of sad.

My elementary school

They tore it down to build homes for old people, or something like that. It's not like I would return to Mapledale Elementary School every day if it was still there. It's the idea that I could if I wanted to. I'm old enough that none of my old teachers would still be there, but just having the chance to walk through the halls and smell that elementary school smell again would be a lot of fun. So it goes.

Not knowing (or caring) how most of the food we ate was terribly unhealthy

Part of this was simply because I was a kid at the time, but we ate all kinds of horrible things back in The Day that would kill a lab rat in hours. We didn't know it was bad for us, nor did we much care. And come to think of it, most of the adults I knew took pretty much the same attitude.

Well, I mean, we knew that McDonald's wasn't the most healthy food in the world, but the general feeling was that if you kept it to once a day or so, you would be fine. As it turns out, the only people who turned out to be "fine" in that arrangement are today's cardiologists.

Nowadays I conduct a quick nutritional analysis of everything I put into my mouth. It doesn't mean I won't eat it, just that I make sure to feel really guilty about it if it's anything other than spinach or blueberries or something.

I think I liked it better when I didn't know I was poisoning myself.