I Reminisce, I Reminisce

Over the past few weeks, I have become more and more nostalgic.  I’ve been off work since April 10th.  I’ve had a number of tests done and taken many painkillers and had some…journeys.  But most of my journeys have been down memory lane.

I’ve re-connected with a few folks from back in’t day.  But I think the nostalgia is more about the fact that my Mum’s 70th birthday is next month (the day after mine) and, shortly after, the 1 year anniversary of her passing will be here.  Since she passed, I have felt somewhat disconnected from life.  Tie that in with my health issues/worries and it also becomes a question of what the point of life is and why do I even bother.  These are feelings and thoughts prominent in my mind during my teens when my outlet was poetry.  Almost every poem I wrote ended with me dying in some shape or form.  My own death was an obsession of mine.  But my prose couldn’t have been that bad; a few of them were published in a variety of compilations…

But, my woes are not the focal point of this post.  I was born in 1984 meaning that in the late 80s and early 90s, the objects of those times shaped and moulded me.  In my mind, that was probably the best era to hail from.  Perhaps that’s biased and everyone thinks that their own era was the best.  But they’re wrong.  Unless they’re from my era.

My only wish is that we had some of the tech we have now, back then (such as camera phones – decent cameras…).

So what was great about being a 90s kid (I class myself as 90s as I remember a lot of my childhood that took place then)?

• Cartoons – kids’ TV was awesome.  From Dogtanian to Batman: The Animated Series…Saturday TV and after school TV rocked.  The only day I hated as a kid was Sunday.  TV sucked balls.
• Gaming – OK, the graphics don’t compare these days but download a ROM for a Mega Drive emulator etc and realise that a 3MB game that was either unbeatable or took hours to complete makes the games of today that are 20GB+ pale in comparison in terms of completion time and the respective cost!
• You couldn’t save games, if you were lucky you got end of level codes so you could return to a later level.  Some games saved (for the life of me I could never figure it out) but generally once you turned the game off you had to start from scratch.  This taught us fundamental life skills such as patience/perseverance.  After all, no one ever went down in history for going ape shit and killing their schoolmates because Paperboy took ages to load on their Spectrum ZX only to misread the cassette after 20 minutes and it had to be reloaded!
• We didn’t stalk our friends.  Back in the day, you would either knock on your mates’ door and ask if they were in/could come out or you’d phone them.  If they weren’t in/didn’t answer/couldn’t come out then that was it.  Now, if you can’t get them on Whatsapp you try Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Viber, Tango and fuck knows what else, then you sit and watch for them to have read the message and get really irritated when they haven’t replied and you keep checking the apps again and again as if, by some miracle, that prompts them to respond.  In some cases, you may go to their house (OMG actual face-to-face contact?!)…with a gun.
• You could say what you wanted without having to worry about hurting feelings.  Now, it’s all about the feels.
• Toys were better quality – for example, my Batman: The Animated Series figures were sturdy (they stood the test of time as most of them are in awesome condition despite being constantly made to fight each other back in the day).  Fast forward to today and the action figures in stores now will probably shatter by simply making them tumble onto a carpet.  The only exception I can think of is Lego.  Lego hasn’t really changed but the licenses they have now in their range would have been awesome back then!
• Phone boxes.  Yes, boxes with phones in them.  Boxes with phones in them that one could stroll into on the way to school and fit in a few prank phone calls to 192 before continuing the miserable journey.
• Video shops.  You know, like Netflix only actual shops.  Where I would spend ages, in some cases multiple visits on the same day, perusing the VHS tapes and sometimes hiding one that I was considering behind some unpopular titles so that I could pick it up once I had decided that I wanted it.

As awesome as some things are nowadays, if they could somehow merge the cool stuff from today but allow me to go back to “my time”…well, I think I would just arrive everywhere.  Face.  Neck.  Chest.

I haven’t done the 90s any justice as I know there are shit loads of other things that I have forgotten (memory loss and getting older are bitches, yo).

If you’re in the same age range and feel something is missing, drop it in the comments below!

If you feel strongly that MY time is not the best time and YOURS is, put forward your argument in the comments too.  But you’re wrong.

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