Link Was Fishing and We Were All Just Happy to Watch
The Lidl lemonade came in cans back then. That’s a small detail but I’ve never fully gotten over it—cold, cheap, carbonated with a specific sweetness that hasn’t existed since, or that I’ve at least never found again. The sky was bluer too. I know how that sounds. I’m saying it anyway.
After school we’d pile onto someone’s sofa, chips and cola, and watch cartoons for hours. Pokémon first, then Dragon Ball, then whatever else was running. Nobody negotiated. Nobody had somewhere more important to be. And afterward we’d go outside and chase each other through the streets doing Son Goku impressions, which was mostly just screaming while running in straight lines.
The Nintendo 64 was the center of the universe. Four of us on Super Smash Bros., someone always yelling, controllers getting sticky from snack residue. Mario Kart 64 at maximum volume. And then late afternoon, someone would put in Ocarina of Time and the room would go quiet. We’d all watch whoever had the controller ride Link across Hyrule Field, the sun setting in the game and possibly also outside, and at some point Link would stop at a pond and start fishing—the most boring mechanic in any game ever designed, a complete non-event, something you could skip in under sixty seconds—and we’d watch in total silence, perfectly content, for however long it lasted. Nobody complained. Nobody grabbed the controller. We were twelve and had nowhere else to be and it was enough.
I think about that a lot. Not the fishing specifically, but the being-fine-with-it. The capacity to be satisfied by something that small.
The longer you live, the more you’ve already died—incrementally, exposure by exposure, until the mechanisms that used to produce surprise stop firing. You’ve touched enough tits and pussies to last the next fifty years. You’ve been drunk enough times to know exactly where it ends. At some point you’re offered a choice between an orgasm and a really good piece of cake and the cake wins, not because you’re broken but because you’ve been there and the cake is just right there. You know everything worth knowing, and what you don’t know probably isn’t worth it. Whatever you’re going through now, you’ve already been through something worse.
I wonder sometimes if this is specific to our generation—kids raised on sitcoms, who had a different surrogate family every TV season, who found sex and death and advertising all at once through a dial-up connection and couldn’t tell them apart. Everything we received came pre-recycled: the fashion was a revival, the music was a revival, even the feelings arrived secondhand, pre-worn by whoever came before us. It’s not cynicism exactly. It’s more like we were handed the cynicism with our lunch money and told to call it sophistication.
The summers of the nineties got hot in ways they don’t seem to anymore, or maybe they still do and I’m just not twelve inside them. The makeout sessions behind the changing rooms at the municipal pool felt genuinely forbidden—the kind of forbidden that produces a specific quality of excitement that has no adult equivalent. The gap between things had weight: between school days, between episodes, between seeing someone again. Instant access has flattened all of that into a single continuous surface with no texture.
We are probably the coolest and most anesthetized generation that has ever existed. That’s the inheritance. Now we get to live inside it.