Dear cowboys, Roman legions, Knights in Impractical Armor, chin-rubbing Socratic daydreamers and lost age peasantry wearing shirts with too many drawstrings; oh, and you, Jules Verne. Yeah, especially you, bright eyes. This is a message from the future. Oh, guess what? You missed it. Stop the presses. Despite your self-congratulating reveries and visions of Things to Come, there are no moon bases or trips to the stars. There is no Captain Nemo, Verne. Here in the distant future (2013!!) Nemo is a fish, drawn by a computer. Yeah, a computer! Don’t get too excited. It’s not a computer shaped like a guy or anything. Our computers aren’t smart or humanoid. They don’t thrill us with the dark possibility of taking over our world. They look like plastic toasters and draw fish. What’s a toaster, you ask. Shaddup, that’s what. You excitable morons all got it wrong. The only flying cars in 2013 are the ones that leave the freeway shoulder in a fiery huff at the behest of illiterate teen texters. Our Fritz Lang Wonder Crap has made us half-wits who wander breezily into roaring traffic while staring raptly at our hands. You have much to look forward to.
Letter from a Discouraged Futurenaut
Published by jef
The blood thrumming around the still-point of this light headache can be traced back to the first rain. That is, our blood just sort of drifts, like smoke, through time; with stops in the Cambrian, the Renaissance and so on. It’s an impenetrable, infinitely-layered heap of unknowing. Okay? (sighs) Yeah The World (as it’s called) is a hopeless lucid dream, but not the kind where you can leap off a building, flap your arms and take joyous id-flight. It’s the kind where you show up for just long enough to see yourself in a mirror and Know that You are Here. That apparently necessary bit of business having been addressed, thermodynamics or some other such fancy idiot enters with a tea towel over its forearm, takes you politely by the gnarled elbow and ushers you back into the soil, where the mostly irritating Circle of Life awaits to make of you a tree, then a shoebox, then wet mush in a landfill again. Bring me my slippers! Oh…never mind. But I’m not here to philosophishizzle. We’re doomed animals at the momentary top of a food chain of no eternal consequence. It feels like. That’s not meant to be a downer. Bacharach sprang from the Ur-ooze, so that recommends the place. Let us celebrate our moment in the hum de dum dum de dum de de de dum dum. View all posts by jef
Numb Dynamo 
I know what the future used to look like. Sigh. Wait, aren’t you the guy in the Chevy Vega?
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