How was my 1999?

I'm 24 in 1999, which is just about the last age where I could be a total bum for a while without feeling like a complete loser and a failure at life. It was the last thrust of proper youth, the last time to be free of any responsibilities. It was a fucking good year.

Me and my mates had all been working since we got out of school, for six years straight at that stage, and just could not be fucked anymore, so we chucked in our jobs and went on the dole and lived a leisurely life of few luxuries.

And for most of the year we all just fucking chilled out, watched lots of movies, smoked lots of pot, ate lots of trash food. It was the year of The Matrix and the final volume of The Invisibles, and it felt like all the freaky weird stuff that I'd spent the decade indulging in was coming to some kind of fruition. Things looked good for the new millennium.

I wasn't getting any comics regularly - not even my beloved 2000ad, which I'd given up after some truly diabolical mid-90s progs. I would still get the latest issue of The Invisibles through mail order, and I still never missed anything to do with Love and Rockets, but that was literally it. I would see advertisements for things like Planetary, which looked sexy as fuck, but I was most bothered by the fact I was missing out on Hourman (I read it 10 years later, it was pretty good).

It was the last year of the 20th century (yes, it wasn't technically the last year because there was no year zero, but general consensus can be a powerful thing), and is rightly seen as a stunner of a year for movies. While that sometimes only becomes clear in retrospect, you couldn't walk out of the theatre into some 90s sunlight after seeing something like the Thin Red Line and Fight Club and The Matrix, and not realise it was a mini golden age for movies.

I listened to a lot of Beastie Boys and Portishead and Pulp's This Is Hardcore, and the Best of 1998 CD that Q put out, meaning the main soundtrack to my life was still a year late.

But everything was a year late, and I do wonder if part of my affection for this period is because it was the last time I was ever not connected to the world at all times. I could only get on the internet once a week, at most, and would spend that precious half hour checking out the niche message boards that my friends still posted on, before catching up on the geek news from comicbookresources.com and fuckin' Ain't It Cool, and that was it, there was nothing more.

Blogs weren't even a thing yet, there was no bandwidth for Youtube, and social media was a nightmare for the future, not an aspirational goal.

I still know I'm seeing this through rose coloured glasses. I was still five years away from properly getting my shit together, and going to journalism school, and everything great in my life has come from that decision. And yeah, it was fun times, but we weren't making any money, and couldn't go out or do anything exciting, and by the time winter started to bite, we were all back in employment, because beer doesn't come for free.

So I moved on with my life, and things changed in ways I could never anticipate, and I haven't had to go on a benefit since then. But I can still remember that thrilling freedom of the last year of my youth, before the new century came crashing in.