no spark. just did and engine swap 88 to 87. (maybe 87 to 88?)
for some reason i can't figure out which wires go where from the distributor. not the plug wires, the other two things. would those even matter?

You have two wires on the side of the distributor which plug into the white connector just above the distributor, on the firewall. They are from the driverside of the loom and are black / white stripe ( Pos ) and brown ( neg)There also has to be a gound wire coming out of the bottom housing edge and grounds to the firewall.

interesting. I've tried all of the combinations i could and none seem to work. Allthought i didn't know the black and white was positive... not that that matters, but earlier i noticed that the pos and neg wires on the coil "appeared" to be swapped because i assumed the black and white was neg. so now they are backwards... regardless it still won't start anyway. i believe my ingition module is bad itself due to the fact that the previous owner hooked the coil directly to the battery.. i heard this can burn it up. so i just bought an entire distributor setup on ebay for 10 dollars. hopefully that'll fix it. thanks for the help, though.

if it was hooked to the battery (the coil) you might try replacing that first I don't think that's good