Is it just me or was 2001 a more futuristic year than this year has been? Is it possible to regress, become less futuristic? Granted it's only five days along but I've still yet to see a single shoe-hat or helmet, which have all but evaporated from the cultural style vocabulary. Listen, helmets are closest to our brains and so it was only natural for them to become the center of all in and outbound communications. Phones, music, bluetooth, vision correction, snack depository, snuff repository, heads up display, Darth Vader breathing assistance, etcetera, etcetera. Light, pithy headgear that gently accentuates daily living and ensures against head injuries. Anyway, point being, I assumed there would be a lot more crap in 2010, lots and lots of hideously designed crap. Crap on walls, crap in cars. Wires and tubes connected to everything everywhere. Need lunch? There's a tube for that. Superfluous design elements, useless facades and vast arrays of lights that serve no purpose other than to advertise for eye cancer treatments.
Instead all our products are becoming lighter, whiter and faster. Mr. "Joe Average" doesn't want to be bogged down by machines, he wants to pretend like he's living a snappy, spontaneous, on-the-go, purposeful lifestyle...and so he compacts all of those machines into a convenient, hand held device that he can stare at throughout the day, that he can stare at while his kids grow up Cat's in the Cradle style. Checking scores and watching mascot bloopers during his wedding. And as he lay on his deathbed, for the first time looking up from his smartphone, and notices that there's no one by his side, it won't matter because they already posted their sympathy on his facebook page.
Jeff says: "Dewder, sry 2 here u got teh cancer."
Lisa says: "omg thats sooooo sad!"
Steve doesn't like this (thumbs down) luckily this was added as a feature after the great "we're starting to get a lot of dead members" debate of 2025.
Illusion, or disillusion, whichever is the most disconnected and over-saturated and tweaked out; there is your future.
Wanna get divorced online? Got thirty seconds?
Fashion predictions and exasperating pessimism aside I now turn my attention to other pressing matters: AS SEEN ON T.V. products
or
"THE Tormented Lives of the Brand X'ers"
Stephanie is a stay at home mom. Every waking hour of Stephanie's black and white existence has been a living hell. In the morning she wakes up to a shrieking, piercingly loud (and four hours behind) alarm clock that she has trouble reading because of the poor quality LCD. And since her reading glasses aren't conveniently clipped to her lapel they might as well be at the bottom of a well. She blind...blind as hell. Rushing to get to work before lunch her faulty bathmat then slips from under her feet, causing her to lose balance and reach for the shower buddy that isn't there. With nothing to grasp onto she falls and cracks her head on one of her sons' toys that should have been picked up by a roomba. Blood that could have easily been mopped up with a shamWOW pours from every orifice! You get the picture.
And now it is five o'clock. Father struggles with ordinary keys, mother struggles with ordinary doorhandles and it's not until seven thirty that dinner finally makes its way to the table, barely. But not after little Timmy has soiled his traditional potty training shorts several times and mother has struggled to clean up the mess with traditional toilet paper dispensers.
A burnt, incoherent mess of a dinner is clumsily flopped on the dinner table while father tries desperately to slice a tomato with ordinary household cutlery. It's a disaster. A sordid affair. Amazingly this was one of the Stevensons' good days.
Each night as the family shivers under traditional blankets they think of the Joneses next door, grossly swimming in unmanageable debt but living a life of effortless, whimsical, ease and bliss thanks to all of the television based products that have now replaced the items that so torment the Stevensons. It's good to live in color!
THE END.
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