Auspicious
Welcome, one and all, to my special 50th 122nd post! You know, it's been quite a long road these past six months or so since I started this thing. If you would have asked me where I would be in my life when I reached a milestone like my 50th 122nd post, I would have told you I'd probably be commuting back and forth to the moon in my flying space-car to my job as a translator at the giant Planets United complex in New New York (Lunar) City.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I reached my 50th 122nd post so quickly. Here I am, in roughly... no, exactly the same place I was when I typed my 1st 122nd post sometime in early November. It's sort of sad when you think about it.

No, the future is always a disappointment. I blame Hollywood. For some reason, every time a movie comes out that is set at any infinitesimal length of time in the future--even just a year or two--there's always some kind of crazy innovation that's happened between the real then and the fictional now that is wondrous strange.

The problem is that now, as we march into the 21st century, all these chickens are coming home to roost. Think of Back to the Future, Part II for example. In that one, by 2015 we'll have handy household cold fusion run on banana peels and soda cans powering cars that fly. Somehow I don't think we're going to make it.

The one good thing about that movie: even though they had flying cars, they still showed traffic. Flying cars are the staple of futurist sci-fi, the one thing everyone predicts, but nobody takes into account that cars, even when freed from the bonds of gravity, will still be driven by people who are, by and large, assholes.

Not having the flying cars I can live with (for now... in '15 there's going to be hell to pay). What I can really live with, though, is not being dead. That's the other thing futurist always predict, that we're just a few flips of the calendar away from some damned cataclysm or another that is going to wipe out humanity. As all the promised dates of destruction come and go I tick them off on the Hello Kitty desk calendar downstairs in the fallout shelter and begin (again) my reintegration into above-ground society. Or, if you want, you can use the reprieve from promised destruction as an excuse to get roaring, shit-faced drunk. Here's a free one: because I'm a dork, I know the original Star Trek said we'd all be dead by now. A race of evil genetically-engineered supermen was supposed to have killed most of us in the 1990s. So go on, throw a few back. When the people at the bar ask what you're celebrating, tell 'em the Star Trek thing. Star Trek is always a sure-fire in for any social situation.

So anyway, as we celebrate together my 50th 122nd post, everything is blandly the same. Same cars, same house, same kids, same wife, even the same goddamn president. I did have to get some new clothes to cover my expanding girth... well no, I guess I can't count a bed-sheet with a neck-hole cut in it as "new".

Even technology is still the same. Sure, we have cell phones that grow into sunflowers, but past that nothing is different.

Take, for instance, Blogger. It's been nearly two months since my automagical post-counter has moved off 122. In fact, I can say with some certainty that the day my Blogger post-counter stopped working was on the day of my 1st 122nd post.

So here, 50 (or so) 122nd posts later, I have no change to report. I guess I can take some comfort in the consistency of Blogger's less-than-optimal operation (at no cost to me!).

Or I could see it as the first pebble. Maybe something so small as that--a minor, annoying failure of technology--is simply the start of a larger interruption, a slow-starting cascading internet(s) wide collapse of all technology, terrestrial and celestial, hurtling mankind back into a New Stone Age where we revert to micro-regional packs of nomadic tribes clubbing one another to death over a half-eaten gazelle carcass or the last few drops of gasoline, Mad Max style. Now there's a future I can get behind.



This post on the Narcissus Scale: 7.7


Pops

- posted by Pops @ 10:06 AM