I got my first apartment when I was in my early 20s and was excited as hell to get it. The thing was just an efficiency, with small bedroom, small living room, dinig/kitchen/bathroom combination but it was all mine!
No more parents suspiciously keeping track of me, criticizing my choices, wondering why I stayed out late and, best of all, I could get laid in my own place! The place was cheap – under $200 a month – and power and phone barely came to $30 a month. (Ancient times, right? No cable though. It had not been invented yet. I used rabbit ears on a black and white TV. No PCs either.)
I reveled in buying my own food, keeping my own hours, stocking up on booze, condoms, snacks, KY jelly, porn books (no VCRs either), colored lights (it was the early 70s), scented candles and stuff. I stayed up late to watch the Outer Limits, Creature Feature and the stations going off of the air around 1 or 2 am, went to all night laundries to wash clothing, prowled around town, met interesting girls and guys and had fun.
I was not wary enough to realize that I could be screwed in more ways than one and was delighted to meet people whose likes I had seen in many movies like ‘Born to be Wild,’ Mod Squad, Baretta, and scores of 60s hippy shows. The first time I got laid by a beautiful hippy chick, I was esthetic. She came complete with long, beautiful hair, big, braless breasts, a foreword attitude about sex, smelled great, dressed ‘funky,’ and liked scented candles. She liked sex also. Boy! Did she like sex!
Then I met the disco chicks and guys, and recall a beautiful redhead who had a great body, wore skin tight flares, platform shoes covered by the bells and liked to get a bit drunk, turn on my colored lights and ‘do it’ to disco music.
Round about then, when times changed, I started loosing the naivety. Those friendly, lean hippy and disco guys got me into trouble, fights, and manipulated me out of cash. Even today when I spot some lean, deeply tanned dude with hair down nearly to his ass and wearing a fu-manchu mustache, headband and calling everyone ‘man’ or ‘brother’ I check my wallet and make sure my knife is within easy grasp.
Money went less far as gas jumped up, power costs jumped up, food prices climbed and my pay did not match the increases. Then came cutbacks in staff and I worked harder for the same money, pulled over time to make extra cash, and discovered the bosses wanted more for less. My neighbors changed, becoming belligerent, often noisy, my bank became less friendly and increased it’s charges, my favorite hamburger joint closed followed by several of my favorite bars. Then my building was sold to new, yuppie landlords who promptly upped the rent, started redoing the apartments and let me clearly know that the place was a turnaround investment, to be sold as soon as finished. They upped the rent twice within two years. I had to move and, trustingly, cleaned my place up until it was much nicer than it had been when I moved in, but the landlords kept my deposit, claiming that I had not done a good enough job. (Damn liars!)
Suddenly, I went from lower middle class on the salary range to upper lower class. The apartments I could afford were in not so nice neighborhoods, often with not so nice neighbors. (I did get laid a lot though, because the chicks, observing that I didn’t lay around in work cloths, showered daily, did not swill beer all of the time with seedy friends and drove a hot car that was not all rust and body putty, thought I was cool. 
) That did not please the guys though and I had a few incidents of trouble, resolved quickly when they discovered that I owned and could shoot a WW2, 9 mm mauser, bought, covered in cavoline, at Woolworth’s in a WW2 weapons sale for $30.
Fat chance anyone will ever see such a sale again. That was one golden opportunity.
Eventually, I realized that I was an adult, that people generally sucked big time, don’t turn your back on anyone, don’t be very trusting of any but good friends, and if you’re doing slightly better than most in a poor neighborhood, people will be pissed at you. I put in air conditioning in the form of a window unit I got cheaply and suddenly, everyone wanted to visit me in the summer. I had the only a/c in the complex.
They drank my beer and booze, ate my snacks, smoked my cigs and weed, ran my power up, got into arguments with each other in my house and I got to pay all of the bills. None even offered me a dollar. I started restricting people visiting, saying I was tired from working too much.
Yeah, being an adult is cool, provided you don’t have to put up with too many other adults. Now I’m aware of political, corporate, banking, and business nasty dealings, know people to whom profit is all no matter how many people quit or get fired, people who have so much money that they have no real concept of how normal folk live and cannot understand poverty. I’ve been on unemployment when jobs were scarce, lost two apartments and had to move home again for a time, was reduced to driving cheap rust buckets that failed the then enforced car inspections, but the repairs were too costly to get done. Had friends who lied to me, friends who stole from me, friends who used me, friends who got me into trouble and friends who went after my girl friends.
Yeah, being an adult is cool. :rolleyes:
Now I spot people hawking investors to buy into distressed products, like weather damaged crops, to raise the prices and resell at a profit, which in turn raised the over the counter prices for those who are pinching pennies. Banks foreclose houses real fast now and resell them to investor groups, who sell them as ‘fixer-uppers’ to people, who go in, slap on paint and resell them at a profit. Each year investors start predicting cold winters, encouraging people to buy stocks in heating oil and gas, which translates later into higher costs for the consumers, many of whom can barely afford the stuff by then.
Natural gas, the cheapest fuel of all, around winter jumps up to $2.75 a gallon! Even in summer, it never drops below $2.00 because of investors. One winter I ran out of gas in my home, which fed my water heater, stove and house heat. I cooked on a Coleman stove, used electric heaters and boiled water to take a lukewarm bath with. It took me two months to save enough money to get a refill because using the electric heaters jacked my power bill up.
Adults often act without the consideration of what their actions will do down the road.
Look, struuter and I even brought our own helmets!