The Future

So this is the future... Hmm... I think I'm disappointed. Where are the flying cars and the space stations (the round kind) and the women wearing shimmering pink and purple Rayon wigs who would whisper in soft, breathy tones things like "The accessway to Sector Gamma is now closed for de-ionization..."

When I was a kid, say, in 1968, I believed that the future should be spelled The Future. Capitalized, you know, because Big Things were in store. We were going to the moon, we were tackling difficult problems like understanding the nature of base drag and wave drag in hypersonic flight, we were starting to make computers that could actually do things instead of those ENIAC-style things that just sort of sat there and got hot, and there was a sense that The Shit was about to happen. There'd be robots so we wouldn't have to clean our own houses and garages. Manual labor would be a thing of the past. People would, if not actually fly to work, then at least go to work in impossibly quiet and unobtrusive vehicles (the real sturm und drang of transportation would take place at altitudes of 80,000 feet and above, where scramjets would accelerate wedge-shaped lifting bodies out to Mach 15... but I'm digressing)... Diseases would be not just cured, not just eradicated, but destroyed so utterly that whole families of related diseases would die too out of sheer despair. And any day now, any damn day, Allis-Chalmers was going to work the bugs out of the HD-41 super-bulldozer, and then by God watch the dirt fly!

I guess the real future as opposed to The Future is okay. Computers are cool, and I like my X-Box, and who in 1968 would have predicted that top fuel dragsters would exceed 300 miles per hour? And the HD-41 is considered moderately puny by super-dozer standards. And we still have Cheez-Whiz, and we haven't nuked ourselves into a wasteland of ash and ruined dreams. And I have to say my off-pump open-heart surgery was highly successful and MOSTLY free of complications, and that isn't something they could have done in 1968. But still, I can't help but think that the future should have amounted to more than "Twittering" on cell phones and downloading reruns of The Family Guy and - uhoh - blogging.

Still, I suppose I shouldn't complain. Even if all that Major Matt Mason wide-eyed The Future nonsense petered out and died like a gladiola in Death Valley, at least I didn't personally peter out and die like a gladiola in Death Valley.

And please tell me that that's an improvement over what might have been.