There was something creepy about the 90s too.
We romanticize it now, but a lot of it was unsettling- at first, maybe. The core characteristic of the decade, in my opinion, was this feeling of calm green serenity that blossomed and evolved, somehow somewhere, within those grittier and more malevolent days of Runaway Train, The Crow, and Smells Like Teen Spirit.
Eventually The Counting Crows and Jewel would would walk us home through all those lush summer maples, crashing about above us amongst the winking stars and moonlit cotton clouds. The deceiving beauty of it all, pushing the shadows low and to the outside. There, in plain sight, but…lessoned, by the smell of progress and spring.
I think of my buddy Tyler’s house all the time. It was old, older than mine. Smelled like cigarettes and sweaty wood. All old wood and warped creaking floors. Oddly shallow steps on the way up. Shaggy white carpet on the second floor landing where his mom had her vanity set up. Pink 90s plastic. Their home was always very cluttered, in a cozy lived in way. Towels often hung over open doors. Antique box fans ran in windows at night. Bobby pins, hair ties, match books, socks, and change were scattered everywhere. We found a condom once on the washing machine down in the basement, where it always smelled like cold concrete and dryer sheets. His dad’s, but the first one we had ever seen in person. We were twelve.
We watched the made for TV presentation of Stephen King’s “IT” about some boys our age, playing in some swampy area just like the area we always played in, dealing with an encounter with cosmic horror from the old tube TV in Tyler’s living room, sitting on those creepy old wooden boards, late at night on a sleepover.
After it ended, when we were cozy in his king size bed and the rest of his nice family (his parents, and little sister) were asleep nearby in their rooms, and the roaring box fan from his parents room- that would always muffle the hallway from their cracked door when I’d slip down the hall in the night to use the bathroom- was humming through the walls next door, I remember reflecting on how grateful I was to be safe with nice people in this cozy beautiful corner of the world.
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