I was a teenager of the 90s and my brain is affected by that weird thing that makes you believe absolutely everything that happened in the 90s was only ten years ago - and that ten years isn't really a lot of time. This comes with a few weird side effects, starting with the fact that I really couldn't name or recognize any bands or actors who became famous during the past decade or so. Which really isn't a big deal, because the only popular music one really has to know nowadays is weird shit that goes viral on youtube. And every movie today is some kind of reboot, remake or some other kind of regurgitated crap from the 80s and 90s. Heck, thanks to Kickstarter, even all our old games are coming back, from Toejam & Earl to Wonderboy to Ultima Underworld and even freaking Bard's Tale!
So most of the stuff I liked as a kid is either still around or it's being brought back. When I look at the Ninja Turtles, Indiana Jones, Star Wars and the A-Team, I'm not so sure if that's really such a good thing, but that's a different subject for another day. The point is, they're marketing our childhood memories to death and whenever they do come up with some new gaming franchise, you'll end up getting annual, near-identical sequels for all eternity. Nothing feels new, everything has already been done a million times. Or maybe I'm just old and I've seen a lot of things, so stuff doesn't excite and surprise me as much as it used to.
Today has reminded me of how absolutely unaware I am of the flow of time when I freaked out over the most uncool thing imaginable: a fucking pot. You know, for cooking. I used to cook most meals in this massive, ancient cast iron pot. I got it as a gift when I moved out of my parents' place some 15 years ago and the damn thing was already super old back then. It's entirely possible that this pot is older than I am. It's just large, black and has some weird, blue non-stick coating on the inside. Maybe it's just varnish, I don't fucking know. It had a bit of a dent on one side where the blue stuff came off and was starting to rust just a tiny bit. Tiny little rusty spot, maybe the size of a pea. Yeah I know, why the fuck would I still use that for cooking, but it was barely visible and it didn't leak or anything and it was my best pot and that's that.
Until today, that is. The ol' rustbucket had finally sprung a leak and needed to be replaced. And frankly, I had absolutely no clue how much one has to pay for a decent pot these days. I have some crummy old steel pot for pasta, a cast iron pan, some fancy frying pan we got as a housewarming gift and ol' rusty, that's it. Never needed anything else, never bought anything. So when I went to the shop to get myself a new pot it felt like Christmas. Because of a fucking pot - true story!
That thing is even bigger than my old pot and weighs less than half as much, because it's made of aluminium. And teflon all around. I remember when my parents bought a frying pan like that when I was a kid and they had to spend a small fortune on what felt like space age technology back then. The whole family gathered around it like it was our new god or something. Meanwhile, that massive pot cost me 18 of our British money units and I got a nice glass lid with it, so now I can see what the fuck I'm cooking at all times. There's a tiny hole in the lid for the steam to escape, so the lid won't hop and dance and I won't boil my face off when I remove the lid. Mmmm, future!
But when I think about it, there's a lot of stuff that used to be super expensive when I was a kid and now everybody has it. I remember when basic cable was all the rage and suddenly we had 20 or so tv channels instead of the usual five. Or when whacking it to internet porn took longer than actual sex, because loading up the pictures could take an eternity and a half whilst costing so much that 1-2 hours of surfing the web each day was already kind of a luxury. We didn't have a Steam library containing 4.500 downloadable titles, either. Heck, everybody hated Steam when they forced you to use it in order to play Counter-Strike. Nowadays we have Origin to teach us that it could have been so much worse.
Our upstairs neighbour has tried to commit suicide again. Well, either that or she was really hungry and she had absolutely nothing but pills in the house. Her family kicked down the door and dragged her off to the hospital. She came back from the hospital right the next day and then her family banged and hammered against the door again when she didn't answer the phone. False alarm that time. It almost always is, but it still makes me wonder.
I mean, the lady upstairs is suffering from bipolar disorder. She wants to die. And she's living all by herself up there. If you had a family member who just tried to kill herself, would you leave her on her own right the next day? Or ever, for that matter? I don't know if they're in denial, if they're just waiting for the inevitable or what the fuck is going on here, but why isn't she in therapy? Why is nobody with her to make sure she's okay at all times? Don't get me wrong, she's the nicest, happiest, friendliest person you'll ever meet on a good day. But holy shit does she want to be dead when she's on a low. If I had to guess, I'd say she probably doesn't want professional help and would much rather live a normal life - because who the fuck wouldn't? Be normal, do normal stuff, don't be watched at all times in case you decide to do something stupid. I get it.
But for fuck's sake, if that was my sister up there, I'd drag her off, kicking and screaming, and have her receive some professional help. We're not talking Arkham Asylum here, there are decent places to help you with this stuff and cruel as it may sound - what's the alternative? Leave her by herself and wait until she finally succeeds and offs herself for real? Great.
"Why do you even care", I hear you interrupt me like some rude asshole. Because I get involved in this mess, whether I want to or not. Because I have to jump out of bed, the bath or wherever the fuck I am whenever her family hammers against the door, because they think she went and killed herself. Because I was asked to grab her by the legs and stuff her in the car that drove her off to the hospital. Because I get random unannounced inspections from a pissed off landlord, who is being told we're dissecting human bodies in our house, following complaints by some random, mysterious stranger who reeeeeally seems to hate us on a bad day. But what am I supposed to do, call the police? Great. They'll go upstairs, tell her to stop being so suicidal and she'll hate us even more and shit will escalate further. I miss our old neighbour. She was cool. Man, the threesomes we could have had. Possibly just on Mario Kart, but it's something.
-Cat
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