We Used to Drink Recessions From the Hose

Yeah, yeah, the stock market is crashing a little bit because we’re governed by giant moist idiots who think self-sanctioning the country to own the libs is a good idea. Whatever. What is there to say anymore, become a Marxist now please, get organized, etc. But the reaction to this culture war disguised as a trade war from some in my cohort online has been interesting. I say “cohort” rather than a specific generational label because depending on who you ask, I’m a baby Millennial or an ancient Gen Z. But a few people in my general age range have seen the coming recession (depression?) and started doing what baseball podcaster and sandwich rotator Lauren referred to as “hose posting”.

If you ever made friends with older relatives on Facebook, you may have seen memes like this:

Or maybe they’ve just told you in-person, multiple times at this point, about how they used to drink out of the hose and they wouldn’t come home till the streetlights came on and how they were a latchkey kid and on and on. It seems like my peers are getting to that age where they’re starting to do their own version of “remember the shit old days?”. Any behavior that reminds me of my mother makes me take notice. She loved telling me these things about her childhood. She told me all sorts of lies upon contradictory lies, but I believe her apparent love for drinking out of hose was 100% genuine. Her eyes would light up when she talked about how much freedom she had as a child. It wasn’t like today, she’d tell me. Parents didn’t care about stranger danger and all that, she’d say. She could leave the house all day and do whatever she wanted. Some nights, she told me once, she’d have to be literally dragged by her ankles through the streets by her mom to go back home. That seemed to be a partially romantic memory for her. She would mostly tell me these stories to justify the generous amounts of neglect she was providing to me and my siblings. It eventually did become much safer for me to leave the house for most of the day when I wasn’t in school, so I followed in her footsteps. I had soooo much freedom. I looooooved the dread of the streetlights coming on and knowing that the bike ride home would be the last chance at peace for the night.

That specific cycle of abuse continued until the late 2000s recession hit and we no longer had a house. We had a Jeep, though! Things got much weirder.

Me, my 3 siblings, our completely dysfunctional mother, one Jeep Grand Cherokee. I don’t actually remember how long it was that we were living in the Jeep. It could’ve been 2 weeks or a few months. My memory of this time is a bit slippery, as you could imagine. One particular afternoon is burned on the CRT screen of my brain though. I think about it any time I see someone hose posting in earnest. It was an absolute scorcher, brutal heatwave. We had ran out of money and bottled water and were running low on gas. I was thinking about how close we were to my friend’s house and how much it would hurt if I just jumped out of the car as we drove past it at 10-ish MPH. My brother asked why we were driving around this neighborhood anyway, and our mother replied “I’m looking for… Ah, there!” and she pointed at a house. She parked the car across the street and told us we were gonna fill up our empty water bottles with hose water at “her friend’s house”. I knew this was a lie in the moment the way she kept checking if anyone was watching, how she didn’t knock on the door to say hi or anything, and clearly nobody was home. I got a pit in my stomach thinking about how much trouble we’d get in if we got caught lurking around someone’s property. I hated when she got us into Situations.

We filled up the water bottles quickly and she gets that twinkle in her eyes that was either nothing or the sign of another manic episode I’d have to deal with, and she starts drinking out of the hose. She’s really gulping this stuff down, too. She offers it to me and I say “No, thanks”. She seemed really hurt by that and said “It’s the same water that’s in the bottles...” and I was a bit put off by that reaction. I’d never seen her so… I don’t know. Down-trodden. It’s like she was regressing to an earlier time in her life and I suddenly felt I had hurt a peer’s feelings rather than my terrifying authority figure’s. I felt pity for her for the first time in my life. It was unsettling. I took the hose and drank some to move past this particular moment in time. I pretended it wasn’t rubbery and disgusting. She seemed pleased and ruffled my hair, which I found even more disconcerting than anything else. Anytime she tried being my buddy, it was usually to try to manipulate me in some way. But today, she was just in a really good mood. I didn’t know what that meant at all. We are in fucking shambles stealing hose water from strangers. Her getting enjoyment out of any of this pissed me off but it mostly confused me. We took the water bottles and got back into the car. I was stuck processing what the hell all that was, so I didn’t go through with my plan to hide at my friend’s house. We drove off to god knows where.

This, to me, is the true essence of hose posting: nostalgia for the past, but specifically the parts of the past that were shit. There’s a sort of Actually It Was Better When Everything Was a Little Bit Shit attitude you see sometimes too. “We lived through recessions and we ate dirt and we’re tough, unlike Kids Of Today who don’t even know what it’s like to drink out of the dang hose!!” Well, I’m here to tell you that I drank out of the hose and it tasted like old pennies and latex gloves. I hated drinking out of the hose. Drinking out of the hose is stupid. You shouldn’t want anyone to drink out of the hose! It’s tempting to sit there and ruminate on your past woes but it’s not good for you if it prevents you from taking action and it’s REALLY bad if you start using it to justify future woes being inflicted on others. I try not to talk about the above period of my life as much because I don’t like giving my mother any of my energy. I want to leave her and drinking from the hose and all the horrible things about society we only keep around because we’re obsessed with maintaining whatever the status quo is… I want all that stuff to be left behind in the past. I want to start building a future where people with mothers as bad as mine can just Leave and everyone always has good clean drinking water and no one ever has to live in a Jeep with 4 other people and I could go on and on but…

Use your woes as fuel. Don’t get stuck telling people about how you used to drink out of the hose.

Nicky Flowers - 04/04/25 - I talked about the hose water so much, I can almost taste it... Blech. I'm gonna go eat some onions or something - (send any comments/questions to hello at nickyflowers dot com)