Elevator Surgery

IN THE FUTURE, instead of elevator music there will be elevator plastic surgery.

This will be provided in most workplaces for employees, to give them that additional "lift," and enhance their focus and productivity.

The rider will select various options (shorter nose, facelift, third eye--very popular in the future with the younger crowd, various liposuctions, bee-stung lips, etc.) and this dramatic change will be accomplished in approximately ten minutes or less.

The individual in question will be rendered unconscious and motionless in approximately three seconds by select neurotoxins and a powerful future anesthetic with no risk whatsoever. A sort of metal octopus, a body cage, will shoot out of the walls and will hold the subject in midair as many smaller metal arms and hands emerge and begin to work their magic.

These robotic hands will be able to resculpt the body, control bleeding, stabilize all bodily functions and clean up any mess without any need for human mediation or supervision.

This will be extremely popular among most male and female employees, but companies will find they need to limit access to this popular emolument, as certain employees will abuse this, continually changing their features when they are trying to catch the eye of a particular office crush. They will keep undergoing elevator surgery in the hopes of finding that one irresistible face and figure.

Companies will put sanctions in place for individuals who abuse this privilege.

Among their co-workers these people will be referred to (quite disparagingly) as "elevator-wads."

They will be guilty of the worst crime (according to society's unwritten laws) not punishable by law. This is, of course, lack of self-confidence.

Some things will never change. Not even in the future.

When someone will be called "elevator-wad," they will most likely pretend it doesn't bother them, then cry later in the bathroom, and fantasize about finding ways to circumvent the elevator limit and find that perfect face that will finally make them happy.

Of course this face doesn't exist. He or she will remain a perpetual elevator-wad.

This nasty epithet will hold pretty much the same stigma the word "ugly" holds today, since in the future no one will be ugly.

The Sparrow's Eye is on the Wetback

IN THE FUTURE, crows, seagulls and other birds will be genetically engineered to act as border patrols and security guards. They are everywhere, watching us all anyway, and they have amazing eyesight, so this will be a rather logical move. They will be trained to activate an alert button when they see a Mexican slipping through a hole in fencing, or a Cuban drifting ashore on a raft he bought at one of the three Havana Toys R Us stores.

They will be paid in Cheese curls and birdseed. They will turn in whole families for three fluorescent orange cheese curls. And love it.

Why, you might ask, would a Cuban citizen risk his life crossing the cruel, shark-infested Atlantic once Cuba is nothing more than one big American shopping mall and thoroughly democratic? "To escape that fucking Friday traffic and all those fucking Starbucks!" he will quickly tell you.

Birds will appear on our money and in our national iconography even more than they do now. The seagull, in particular, will undergo a serious image makeover from its current status as "aerial rodent" and "annoying dumpster diver," to "proud defender of the American borders." Children will be given chocolate sparrows at Halloween as a sort of little nationalistic treat. Children will wear different species of birds as mascots as they progress through the Avian Scouts.

Needless to say, birds will be hated in the third world, and many birds which have not had their intelligence modified (the spy birds get recombinant DNA taken from some of the sneakier Bush family members) will be needlessly shot, stoned, pierced by arrows and poisoned with bad feed. These poor dumb creatures will fall to the earth in innocence, paying for the sins of their brothers in wings. They will be the little Christs of the future, but no one will remember their names.

Wait, they didn't have names, did they?

Oh well.

I think God wrote, "Oh, by the way Nature is a dumpster. Sorry 'bout that."

But they forgot to put that in the Bible.

More of Less / Megalomania

IN THE FUTURE...

1. ...I will write more IN THE FUTURE posts. I can't promise they'll be good or interesting or even worth the minor wear 'n tear on your monitor screen [the you in "your" is only hypothetical, mind you], but there "you" have it: I shall be productive! Even if I am yelling, Tourettically, in an empty cyber room, my "voice" reverberating like so many wanton pixels. I shall embrace the new ascendent ethic: MORE!!! MORE!!! MORE!!! Who cares if it's any good? How many Police Academy movies were there anyway? (If you know the answer to that question without further research, you should be promptly cudgeled with a multi-fuction universal remote.)

2. ...they shall construct a massive monument in my likeness on a moderately-traveled numerical interstate highway. Perhaps there will be an adjacent gift shop and, I dunno, a chocolate-covered banana stand. For a frame of reference, imagine--if you will--the statue of Thetis in her temple in Joppa in the early-1980's mythological adventure film Clash of the Titans by the stop-motion animation master Ray Harryhausen. Dame Maggie Smith (one of the few broads in acting who actually deserves her title) plays Thetis with supercilious aplomb here, but let's face it: she's slumming it in this flick. Yet, I won't cast the first stone because she's in boffo slumming company; we've got Sir Laurence Olivier, Claire Bloom, Sian Phillips, Ursula Andress... oh, and the remarkably large-nippled Harry Hamlin and the terrifically out-of-place Burgess Meredith, too. Apparently, the Royal Shakespeare clique needed some quick g's for nose candy or amphetamines... Whatever. I won't judge. Anyway, Thetis (Smith) is pissed--I'm talkin' Tonya Harding-grade pissed--that Andromeda has broken her engagement with her son, Calibos, who, not incidentally, has been turned into a brown-skinned reptilian sort, who (I hate to say) resembles a souped-up nineteenth-century Semitic stereotype, right down the Jewfro and the bling. So Andromeda, being a hardcore shiksa from way back, says, "Awwww, hell no." She opts instead for Perseus (Hamlin: togaed, sandaled, and square-of-jaw), who will surely yield better wedding gifts since his pops is none other than CEO of the gods, Zeus himself (Olivier). (This is one hell of a digression, by the way. Feel free to run off, get some snacks, power wash your vinyl siding, clip your toe nails, and come back later when I tearfully reunite with the point of this story.) But Zeus tells Thetis, who is only a minor goddess and hasn't earned full vengeance privileges yet, to step off because his large-nippled son shall pluck of yon cherry tree, and Thetis and Calibos can go, jointly, bite it. Well, Cassiopeia, Adromeda's mother, (played by the wonderful Sian Phillips) majorly goofs while she is officiating at the wedding in Thetis's temple. (Thetis is the patron goddess of Joppa, you see.) It's fortunate, however, that Cassie does what she does because otherwise there would likely be no pretext for the remainder of the film. Cassie proudly remarks that her daughter is "more lovely than the goddess Thetis herself." Woops. This boo-boo essentially gives Thetis carte-blanche to meddle, and meddle she does. Her statue, which is, like, Statue of Liberty-height and, oh, by the way, standing right behind the wedding party, starts hella shaking, like 6.4 on the Richter scale, and the head--the fuckin' head!--breaks off and lands in front of the couple: she, dewy and virginal, and he, yet large of nipple. And then... how's this for showbiz? The statue opens its eyes and starts talking. (Let's see Cirque de Soleil pull off that kind of shit. I think not.) Anyway, Thetis says, in one of the all-time wedding day announcement bummers, that in thirty days Andromeda must be sacrificed to the "Krakken" [basically, the Creature of the Black Lagoon on steroids] (and furthermore that she must be a virgin because the Krakken is on a strict slut-free diet) or else all of Joppa will be destroyed! As you can guess, this is strictly an Austin Powers "Let's give the hero enough time to get out of the fine mess" scenario--because, after all, why can't Thetis be all "Zap! You dead, bitch" anyway? I'll tell you why. It comes down, yet again, to a little something I call Entertainment Value. Sure, Andromeda could have been instantly zapped leaving behind only a white robe in need of dry cleaning and a pile of virginal ash, but that isn't going to get your average Gentile adult to pay $4.00 to see a sword and sandal flick, even if the horned Jew is the villain. (This was the early 80's, remember? $4.00 is nowadays what they charge for an extra dollop of flesh-scalding butter-flavored topping.) One of my favorite stupid lines is when Thetis (as the statue head) says, with imperious hauteur, "[Andromeda] must be unknown to man." Then she pauses a beat and clarifies the euphemism: "A virgin." When I recite this line randomly in Real Life, I like to add more technical clarifications afterward, like "A man's erect member, in other words, must not have been inserted and removed repeatedly from her lubricated sugar walls until the aforementioned schlong ejects a viscous wad of love cider at high velocity into the inner, yearning depths of her Carlsbad Caverns." After this explanation, then Thetis could resort to graphs, charts, and Power Point presentations if necessary. So what does all of this have to do with anything, you might justifiably ask. Well, let me refresh your memory if you haven't lapsed into a semi-conscious state: In the future, they shall construct a massive monument in my likeness on a moderately-traveled numerical state highway, and it will be a lot like Thetis's statue in Clash of the Titans, which is to say that when people take a breather at the rest stop where my statue is located, take a sip from the drinking fountain in my left pinky toe, and say or do something that severely (or only minorly) offends me, my head (as in cranium) will break off, my eyes will open, and I will say something like: "Eat shit, you turd decanters. Oh, and by the by, one of you needs to have lunch with Krakken at, say, the Ivy next Thursday." Did I mention by any chance that the statue of me will enhanced somewhat? I figure if I had a larger proportional penis on the statue, then maybe kids and sad cripples and stuff could go up a corkscrew escalator in my leg and, when they reach my groin, descend a slide to the tip of my (other) head, through the window-hole of which they can look out over the majestic countryside (at $10.00 a slide) and maybe even buy a t-shirt or keychain fob. (Plus, in my statue version, I want my nose to be smaller. Not Diana Rossish, you understand, but a little less Eastern European.)

Connected

IN THE FUTURE, people will become more and more like websites.

You can already see this happening. We are usually wired for text, voice or image messages (several devices, usually). We are able to connect more and more randomly with people and also more selectively.

Eventually, it will be logical to physiologically implant some of these devices. Carrying things around is annoying.

We will have strange blue or red or multi-colored rather-L.E.D.-like glows: a genetic engineering modification which uses the bioluminescent enzyme luciferase--the same substance fireflies use. (Thank you Human Genome Project!) Luciferase activation will be mediated by microchips under our bellies programmed to "fire up" when someone we desire is close...nights in the club district downtown will be beautiful with human fireflies feeling connections towards other. These lovers will have programmed compatible information into their somatic desire systems.

This will be so much better than trying to sniff out pheromones or make good eye contact across a crowded room filled with distracting (if pleasant) soundwaves.

And when love blooms there will not be the anachronistic, painful stumbling towards an appropriate and nuanced and sincere protestation of eternal commitment.

The warm lambent glow under the skin will say it all: "I love you."

And when love dies there will be no anachronistic, painful stumbling towards an appropriate and nuanced and sincere confession that you are killing me, you're drowning me, you're holding me under the water and just watching the bubbles escape my mouth and nose in a silent scream. And you don't even care.

The cold lambent glow under the skin will say it all: "Fuck off or die."

Surely you have realized by now that streamlining is the banner under which the future marches.

Slowpokes, dwellers and mourners might want to consider some other itinerary.

Beach Blanket Bingo, Mon Amour

[In Memory of Audrey Wells.]

IN THE FUTURE no one will die and living will just be this thing that you keep on doing no matter what. Funeral parlors and grief counselors will be put up on shelves and look quaint and we’ll laugh (oh how we’ll laugh) til we snort and ache throughout our fleshy middle parts. In the future no one will die and the second coming will have already come last week with jesus christ still superstar jet skiing while waving to tittering crowds bent upon bleachers under the blue beyond blue sky which will mean nothing more to us than looking nice and not make us think (oh no never make us think) how small and unimportant we are because we’ll know that we aren’t anymore (or never really were). You’ll say while pointing is that buddha by the elephant ear trailer humming the pina colada song which everyone will know was sung by rupert holmes because we will all by then know every single thing that ever needs knowing even the small ones that don’t. In the future no one will die because mohammed will be doing the pony under the boardwalk in a linen shift with such a naked joy that will make his face creak like floorboards because has he ever really smiled before you’ll ask and we’ll say no not that we ever seem to recall having seen. In the future no one will die because when you think about it (which you won’t) it’s a stupid stupid thing to do on a day like this when there is so much here to do and see and if you’re gone we’ll have to do it all without you and that will only be half as good. If even that much but probably not.

Silence Will Indeed Be Golden

IN THE FUTURE, it will be very noisy with all the new people nature has created, all the new machines humankind has created, and all the complaining about the emotionally draining and spiritual deadening nature of constantly trying to force one's way through oceans of similarly frustrated and simultaneously complaining bodies.

Those few individuals who will have moved into the less-populated areas and will be enjoying their quiet lives will really irritate the majority of citizens who will be forced to live in these monstrous cities of the future.

Government (which will be world government at this point) will decide to take advantage of this via legislative demagoguery, and will create several very stiff taxes on silence.

A device will be created which measures loudness and duration of noise and several of these "dissonometers" will be placed around the dwellings of all citizens. Most importantly, each citizen will be chipped with a tiny dissonometer which will measure their exposure to noise throughout their day on their travels. City-dwellers who happen to somehow avoid being exposed to the aggravation of noise will not be immune to this tax.

Citizens will come up with schemes to try to expose their dissonometer to noise without being physically present and suffering the effects of the noise themselves, but these criminals will have their sentences handed down by a draconian hand. "Silence offenders" will be housed in separate parts of correctional facilities the same way child molestors are today, and for the same reason; the general inmate population would tear them to pieces.

Silence will become a new status symbol and most travel brochures and magazines appealing to the tastes of the wealthy will adapt silence as the sexiest of commodities, and sure sign of having "made it." A popular come on line a few centuries hence will be, "My hush or yours?" Also, citizens will be heard to repeat the adage, "Zoom! zoom! zoom! gets you a quiet room." This is roughly the equivalent of the present day, "The early bird gets the worm."

In the future, death will be seen as almost attractive, for all the silence it will hold.

It will be called, "mouthless place" and "the promised hush" and sometimes "the paradise of Shhhhh!."

Minor Major Malfunction

IN THE FUTURE, things will work very, very, very, very well 99.9999999999999999 percent of the time....but when they don't work very, very, very, very well....you will be moving very, very, very, very fast....so you won't really know it's all over....

Dear Bugs on the Windshield of the Future,

take comfort in that.

You Take the Good, You Take the Bad

IN THE FUTURE will you run (barefoot) through fields with me? Not the kind of fields with crop circles. I mean Kim Fields. You know, Tootie from NBC's long-running 1980's sitcom The Facts of Life. How does a girl earn the name Tootie, by the way? I wonder if the writers, before they put pen to page, really sat down and fleshed out a backstory. I always imagined it was because she broke wind a lot. She looked like the kind of girl who would have trouble digesting certain raw vegetables, like celery and artichokes, for example.

Tootie, if you're reading this, I want you to wrap your ass lips around my big Polish nose, as if you were a Chinese finger trap for noses, and I want you to fart your spicy-sweet love into my periphery. I want to hear your ass lips whisper, "Get out of my dreams, get into my car," while you're trapping my nose in the rain in the St-Germain-des-Pres, somewhere around Les Deux Magots. But, wait, don't speak with your mouth full, Tootie-ass-lips, and don't you fucking dare to cry, thinking about Nancy McKeon and that muffin-top mullet she had. And why won't that bitch return for reunion specials, by the way?

Milk of Human Kindness

IN THE FUTURE everyone--and I mean everyone--will be lactose intolerant. Even a hypothetical mewling babe-in-arms supping on the teat of its uteral precursor (see also: mother [archaic, descended from "moth": a fluttering, light-seeking pest]) will succeed at naught but vomiting and writhing. It shan't, however, be just any hunch-and-wobble, quease-and-keel varietal of vomit which shall thus issue forth, but the particularly acidic melange of tapioca, spittle, grain alcohol, and raw lactase, which, then garbing the jolly knobs of the uteral precursor (as if a dimpled, meringue breastplate) will signal the final betrayal by the species of itself. We shall neither drink milk nor, long since, love. Happy Valentine's Day.

The First Foxfur President

IN THE FUTURE, the not-too-distant future, America will get its first furry President.

His name will be Chad Philbin. He will be a great grandson of Regis.

Furries are people who fetishize animals (plushies if they are into stuffed animals), and enjoy dressing up like animals, role playing as animals and sometimes having sex while in their animal persona (fursona, to be more exact) , often with another individual also romping in his or her animal persona.

The first furry president of the United States will be a "foxfur," which means his particular turn on is fox-play.

He will be elected with the slogan "Crazy Like a Fox," after one of his Republican opponents unwittingly calls him crazy. That was the moment Chad's campaign managers had been (somewhat deviously) waiting for.

President Philbin will have a First Vixen instead of a First Lady.

She will look adorable with her fox snout and long lashes...she will never appear in public out of her foxfur persona during their entire eight year occupancy of the White House.

She will actually be very popular as internet masturbation fodder when several very revealing photos and videos of her in her foxy bedroom play are released, photos and videos from before her marriage to Chad.

Instead of apologizing to the nation for these photos and videos being released, or hiding from the fallout, Chad and his First Vixen will speak publicly. They will be the model of decorum and maturity.

With his First Vixen at his side, he will say, "I think she's unbelievably hot in those videos and photos. Seeing her with that camel especially turned me on. And the monkey scene was unbelievably good! And that Vixen on Vixen scene? Wooo-eeee! You're amazing, honey. Thank You, whoever released those! It makes me want to get yiffy with it right now!"

Then he will turn and kiss his foxy lady and the public will cheer.

A brief explanation of the term yiffy for you people who have not yet arrived in this glorious, highly-eroticized, anthropomorphic future: In furry fandom, furries often enjoy erotic art featuring furries or their animal familiars "doing the do," and this style of art is known as yiffy art. Another similarly-derived term in the furry lexicon is a "yiffy fur", which describes a furry who is sexually aroused. "Yiff" is used to signify sexual activity or material. "The postulated etymology of the term within the subculture is that it is an onomatopoeia for the sound foxes make when mating," an early 21st century grammarian speculated. Sometimes the term "furvert" is used, either humorously--or rudely--to describe the devotees of furry fandom.

President Chad will sometimes humorously refer to himself as a "furvert" and will often talk about "getting yiffy with it," and America will come to love him for his natural earthy humor and candor.

America's first furry president will look adorable on money when he finally makes it to the five dollar bill. (People will have forgotten who Lincoln is by then...he will just be "that creepy green man.") But this will be after our first foxfur president dies, of course.

By that point in time, he will have earned his place on that currency.

While alive, he will help America mature enormously.

He will of course secure animal rights and help Americans move towards a vegetarian or vegan diet.

He will finally have America sign the new Kyoto Accord commiting us to a responsible environmental course, and he will stop America's tendency for warmongering and cultural imperialism.

America will finally be liked by the world.

An assassination attempt will be made by one of the Beefeater militants, but the foxfur president will actually pounce upon the would-be assassin himself and use a special scent-gland he had created for his outfit to temporarily blind his attacker. This will earn him mad respect from the citizens of this country.

People will long talk about his White House parties and soirees, where many of the Foxfur First Couple's closest furries and plushie friends will of course be invited.

There will be many celebrated photos of these White House dinners and parties, with long tables immaculately set and covered with sumptuous dishes being enjoyed by dozens of different animals from reindeer to tigers, from kangaroos to polar bears.

President Chad will go down in history as one of our finest Presidents, and will be remembered long after people think Ronald Reagan was "that guy who wore the clown outfit and poisoned generations of Americans with artery-clogging dead matter."

President Chad will be remembered as a great man, if just a little bit a "phreak."

His most celebrated biography will be titled A Gentleman and an Animal.

This book will be read long after Profiles in Courage lies in the landfills of forgotten history, next to those pink plastic "feminine hygiene" applicators that cause toxic shock.

Phil Spector, What Do You Do With Your Dead Hookers?

IN THE FUTURE hairdo technology will improve greatly.

Prediction: The Bisexual Bus

IN THE FUTURE, everyone will be straight for fifteen minutes.

Twilight of the American Idol

IN THE FUTURE god will come down to earth, on a rhythmically-kerthumping escalator or what-have-you, from his (surprisingly literal) berth on a cumulous cloud. Immune to figure flattery, he will be wearing a voluminous ivory satin robe, ungathered and unsashed, which in certain irreligious asides will be remarked as a muumuu or, worse, a polyblend tarp. Some will suspect that god has a big ol’ booty, while others, that he is retaining water, still others--straining for magnanimity--that he is big-boned, excessively hale.

Halfway down the escalator, god will yank at his skirting and grimace. The hem, already frayed into choppy fringe, will have caught between a riser and the sidewall, and in a panic, he will rip a haggard peekaboo slit all the way up to his flabby pink quads. He will regret many things in that moment, but chiefly that he hadn’t bronzed his legs past his knee because this was his winter-weight shift--so why bother?

The spectators on earth, taken aback (and even afront) by god’s slow, prosaic descent, will sink with disappointment. They will have expected Yahweh to much less resemble a preoperative Kenny Rogers. God’s beard, for instance, will not stream away from his noble face in long, snowy-white tendrils but will be close-cropped and faintly yellowed in strands. His face, instead of wrathful and righteous, like Frank Sinatra’s, will seem almost dimwitted, with his eyes ever-so-slightly crossed and his teeth very-decidedly bucked. He will, in short, resemble your Uncle Shecky, who lives near a duck pond in Sarasota, where a large black woman named LaTasha comes to check up on him daily and, occasionally, to wash his prickly ass with a cold dish rag.

Needless to say, we will be unimpressed and start talking about other things in small groups: the unseasonable weather, social security: status quo vs. privatization, and the rising cost of alpaca wool. We will have scarcely noticed that god, clutching his train like a dainty bride, will have arrived on the earth and approached a podium, sans insignia or colorful bunting and surrounded by a gaggle of foam-tipped mics from local media (and even one major network).

He will seem to squirm and will sweat profusely, with amoebic stains of dirty-ivory ringing his neck and trailing down his back. He will as yet have failed to command attention, despite an occasional theatrical cough and several taps, snorts, and gravelly ahems.

One child nearest him (“Let the children come…”), dirty-faced and coarse-featured, will point and laugh at the fat pussy in the girly-dress. It will be a piercing, vulgar laugh, like a gummy-mouthed hooker’s, the kind that strikes at a frequency that tingles through each of your bones like a tuning fork.

In small klatches, the crowd will eventually grow silent in its own way and time, and this silence will prove contagious. The audience, now hot, tired, and eyeing the periphery for a concessions trailer, will have at last surrendered to this fat man: looking squirrelly and sebaceous.

Finally, breaking the long silence which descended upon humanity subsequent to the Fall and which had tamped out all life and hope, like a Manhattan telephone book keeling over a quorum of ants, god, stammering and dripping at the nose, will--yes!--speak:

“I don’t exist,” he will say, failing to make eye contact. He will consult notes he had written in purple ink on recipe cards and had tucked into the false front of his robe. His recitation will be flat, unimpassioned, and, at least twice, punctuated by stanched, airy belches. “I had supposed that millennia of disease, bloodshed, and despair would have made this declaration on my behalf, as I am indeed no master of the oratory. But no. Human beings are a tenacious animal, it is now clear. Beyond the misery of your unspeakably small lives, you will inevitably find the carrot on any stick, even if that carrot is only a desert mirage. (Please pardon the mixing of my metaphors. I am not adept at the rhetorical flourish.)

“Where was I? Oh, yes…

“You rabid little beasts! You are never to be put off your mission. Not by famine, genocide, or plague. You have been given absolutely nothing. No, even less than that. But out of this deficit you have created all sorts of chimera: wrathful ghosts, capricious gods, and even a sad-eyed Jew nailed to a stick.

“I am--if you’ll pardon me--tempted to mock you, but I can not and will never impugn your resourcefulness. Over time, you have gathered stern-looking men, learned scholars, and even a few unscrupulous scientists to pore over dusty texts and work their minds into knots. And to what end?

“To prove my existence, of all things. This pudgy, impetuous, and--worst of all--schlumpy creature you see before you. Do you, good sir, wish to spend eternity with me? How about you, madam? All of eternity--as an abysmal subset of my will? And why my will and not your own?

“Anyway, I intended to be brief and let me remain so. In case there is any lingering doubt, let me say again most emphatically: I. Do. Not. Exist. And with that I bid you adieu.”

God will then have vanished with nary a kindling of pyrotechnics. Some in the nearest vicinity will claim, however dubiously, to have heard a miniature pop, much like the burst of a lone packing bubble, but otherwise there will be no neon, fire, or dry ice fog to be seen. It’ll be something like going to a Megadeth concert only to end up with a tuxedoed Yo-Yo Ma.

The glum distension of the crowd will immediately set to work. No one will be in the mood for conversation. All that will be heard is the staccato shuffle of steps and the faraway ingnitions of myriad late-model Chrysler Town and Countrys.

Within an hour, the crowd will have entirely dispersed, but lingering in its stead will be a strange inventory of detritus: a crumpled, waxy Necco wrapper, a few orphaned shoes, several empty grease-blotched popcorn boxes, a used ribbed condom, an unvalidated parking ticket dated last year, numerous collapsed soda pop cans, a pink rain bonnet, an open-mouthed compact with broken mirror, twenty-seven rubber bands of three discernible thicknesses, a pair of orange rhinestone-encrusted sunglasses with the left arm bent against the joint, foil chewing gum wrappers, the extracted pump from a Jergens bottle, a broken Seiko wristwatch, an informational pamphlet about psoriasis, and--of course--in the distance, the still rhythmic kerthumping of the uninhabited escalator.

After another hour, short wiry men in navy coveralls will have arrived with buckets on wheels and long-armed dustpans. All they will have to say is: “What a fucking mess.” And they will smoke off-brand cigarettes and hum popular commercial jingles to themselves.

Dismemberment of Things Past: The Unifier Chip Renders 72% of All Novels Pointless

IN THE FUTURE, great strides will be made in solving the (possibly primary) problem of romantic love.

Science will learn at last how to shock the Proustian monkey out of his funk.

Romantic love isn't per se a problem to society...when it's working.

When it's not working, however, it eventuates in all sorts of social ills, from lost work time and productivity to shooting sprees in shopping malls and amusement parks.

That's amore, as the song goes.

Better living through chemistry didn't work, so future scientists will decide it's time to chip the malfunctioning chimps.

The critical moment in the solution of the problem of romantic love will be the invention of the Unifier Chip.

The Unifier Chip is a microchip surgically implanted in the brain which creates consonance out of cognitive dissonance. It was first created to solve the problem of "lost love"....also known as "love lost" to the more poetic among you.

Scientists noticed that lovers tend to romanticize their first love relationship (or an earlier one) and dwell obsessively upon the ways in which their current romantic relationship does not measure up to this earlier--usually impossibly idealized--relationship.

Scientists created a microchip which brilliantly fuses and melds the image of the previous, idealized lover (who probably never existed in the near-divine form which the nostalgiacally cruel brain is "remembering") to the present, less-than-perfect lover.

A cognitive overlap is created and then the two lovers (past and present) are fused. The earlier lover collapses into the present lover as into a blackhole. The chip sorts for chronology and erases all the particulars of the previous lover, such as image, physical characteristics, personality, name, etc.

All the positive traits and feelings of deep and long association, of abiding love, are transferred to the new lover.

The divorce rate plummets to near zero with the invention of the Unifier Chip. (Some people run off before they can be chipped.)

Sometimes "chippees" being guided by the wisdom of their unifier chip will make little errors (due to chip glitches) in speaking to their current lover, but the current lover will know enough to keep his or her mouth shut.

For instance, here is a typical exchange:

Chippee: "You play the piano so beautifully."

Lover: "Thanks."

Chippee: "I wish you would play something for me. Play that Delibes piece..."

Lover (who couldn't even play a kazoo): "Uh, not today, I have a headache..."

Chippee: "How does it go again?"

Lover: "How does what go?"

Chippee: "That beautiful Delibes aria you played for me when we first met. Remember?"

Lover: "Hey, I have a great idea for something we can do instead of that. Let's go bowling."

But such misunderstandings are a small price to pay for finally abolishing the problem of eternal and pointless yearning.

Unfortunately, this means that approximately 72% of all novels written before the advent of the Unifier Chip will now seem really whiny and stupid to a populace used to having their cake and eating it too.

These books--classics for centuries--will sink into oblivion very quickly.

And the ghosts of all our former lovers will finally get the clean sweep they deserve, that sweep out of our brains and souls, with the final Whoosh from the Unifier chip....the final broom push we spent our lives being too timid or quixotic to give them.

Thank You, Unifier Chip, for making a Brave New World!

Goodbye Great Gatsby & all you million other desire-mongers!

Mother Can You Spare a Decalette?

IN THE FUTURE not much will have changed.

What? You were expecting maybe a new vertical traffic of gassy hovercrafts and a snug, little humidified polypropylene pod to sleep in, like the Japanese already have? You clearly watch too much TV. Alone. With your pants off and picking on that scab which will in fact scar if you don’t quit it, so quit it now. Your mother will have been right again about that, and many other things besides. She could have written a book, with appendices, about all the things she knew, in adorable little post-Nietzschean aphorisms, and in the future she will have written it, too, and it will have sold four-point-three million copies and--by the way, didn’t you (at one time) want to be a writer?

In the future she, your mother the authoress, will have gone to Stockholm with only a carry-on containing two tri-color track suits, a ball of pragmatic underthings, and other odds-and-ends: you know, womanly things, because lord knows what these Swedes do, if anything. She’ll return a week later with the same carry-on, some duty-free eau de toilette in a bottle shaped like a pancreas, and five billion dollarettes (which will be the new currency in the future--in case you’re too dense to surmise).

But aside from the dollarettes, not much will have changed in the future. The most conspicuous color on your time-use pie chart will still be of course red, which is for Miscellaneous. Which is the umbrella term for all the life-eroding particulars like, for instance, standing in the rain waiting for the bus, trying to flush the urinal with your elbow, and scooping nuggets of animal feces out of a plastic box with a baby-blue plastic mini-shovel.

You’ll still, in other words, have no one special in your life to bake you a birthday cake from scratch or to juggle your testicles playfully under the flannel sheets with her skinny fingertips or to stab you seventeen times in your sleep because she can’t live without you. People all around you will have been murdered by their obsessive bedmates, but you will sleep alone, on a stained, sunken mattress and not at all in an egg-shaped pod. You will stare at stranded water stains on the ceiling--which will resemble, at first, Buddy Ebsen in profile but then, in the torque of shadows, some sort of arthropod.

In the future not much will have changed, you see. There will still be boarded-up shopfronts and, behind them, curling lead paint. And there will always be mothers in novelty anklets, offering to loan you three thousand dollarettes at one above prime.

Paintpigs and Paintstones

IN THE FUTURE, tears will be regulated by the government.

Like everything else they get their grubby little bureaucratic paws on, they will mismanage this horribly.

People in the future will be highly medicated. The pharmacopoetic feelings will mostly keep them exactly where they need to be emotionally, but there will still be the usual tragedies, disasters and (of course) love there to upset them even beyond the reach of their medication lullaby sometimes.

The government will prescribe the correct number of times one should cry in one's life; this will be expressed as a numerical range.

The GRLQ (Government-Recommended Lacrimal Quota) will ultimately settle in at the range of 14 to 19.

That means the average citizen will be expected to cry between fourteen to nineteen times in his or her life.

No more. No less.

Babies and toddlers will be given special government exemption, of course. Once the fourth birthday is achieved, however, the expecatations and enforcement will be draconian and unforgiving.

The government (and doubt not: at this point in time we are talking world government; all the criminals finally got together) will get creative here with tears.

They will issue "paint cards" at the birth of each citizen.

Citizens are to keep one or more of these on them at all times.

When the (rare) urge to cry hits, you are to allow your tears to fall upon this small square of durable plastic, which is approximately the size of a credit card.

Your tears will reveal a hidden painting (chemically invisible until contact with your emotional outpouring) of great beauty, to be cherished.

Each card is an original, created by artistic citizens working within the Bureau of Tears, under the Department of Emotional Stabilization (the government finally realized in the late 22nd century this was a completely necessary addition to the Cabinet).

Citizens will cherish their little tear paintings, and it will be a sign of true intimacy when someone shows you their collection, or one from their collection. They will most likely be sharing their most treasured (government-regulated) feelings.

The government of the future will have realized that it is important to allow people their humanity; but to regulate this humanity is even more important....from a governmental point of view.

Sometimes someone, usually a teenager, will say "what's the big fucking deal with the cards?"

This person will usually quickly disappear, and reappear later with a much healthier attitude towards paint cards.

Crying will assume an almost religious significance in the world of the future.

Crying will be hoarded like gold.

Unfortunately, the bourgeois element will continue on, and crying will be abused as a status marker and as a clique magnet. For instance, some mothers will schedule "My Daughter's First Tears" parties for their wealthy friends and carefully prepare their daughter for her debutante moment in the presence of many friends and her parents' business associates.

This will be a rather debased form of the bas mitzvah (or bar mitzvah with boys) and will be frowned upon by the government.

Citizens who do not use their allotment of paint cards will be rather uncharitably referred to as "Paintstones." (This will be a very serious insult, and in some cases punishable by civil litigation).

Citizens who use up their allotment of paint cards will need to request more from the government.

These hapless folks will be referred to (usually behind their backs) as Paintpigs.

You will not want to be either a "Paintpig" or "Paintstone" in the world of the future, as it will seriously jeopardize your dating/mating possibilities.

Several people will become famous for having produced several exquisitely beautiful tear paintings in one lifetime, although this will of course have all been the work of the government.

But still they will rest in museums, in glass cases lit by track lighting, and people will still whisper in hushed tones in these dark museum chambers the way they do these days looking at the playthings of a pharaoh, or one of his many wives.

Offer Good for a Limited Time Only

IN THE FUTURE there will be MORE!!! rather than less. In addition to MORE!!! there will be other many new and wonderful things, such as but not limited to NEW & IMPROVED!!! and FREE GIFT WITH PURCHASE!!! and NOW 25% LARGER!!! People will look around themselves and see MORE!!! They will be so elated at this quantitative and magnitudinal advancement that they will dance in the streets, until the police arrive to club them into submission. Even with severe injuries, such as skull fractures and internal bleeding, revelers will rejoice in the plenitude and in the promise of yet even MORE!!! to come. They will kiss the officers on the lips like brethren until they are arraigned.

People, having grown tired of dearth and deprivation, will jut elbows, conspiratorially, into their neighbors' sweet spots and say [the ones to the others]: "Do you remember those days when there was not MORE!!! but only less?" The neighbors will laugh uproariously together, in the manner of reunited friends, so much so that a flute-like fart will escape their sphincters, but the notes therein achieved will harmonize. All across the world, in the splendor of the shadow of MORE!!!, such scenes will be duplicated, with only metric displacements in time and tone, until altogether this mellifluous parade of flatulence will accomplish so sublime a rendition of Chopin's Nocturne No. 1 in B flat minor (Op. 9 No.1) that longtime enmities will be salved and former opponents will weep in each others arms. Everyone together will then bare their naked bodies, relieved of Edenic shame, and flail about, as if enraptured, within and among hillocks of MORE!!! which will vanish deep into the horizon like so many echoing undulations of the sea.

It is verily unfortunate that we speculators shall all have long solved the mysteries of death before the advent of MORE!!! Perhaps our children's children's children, or even another generation hence, shall arrive at the most opportune confluence of events which will finally deliver them forever from want. For this blessed generation, satiated by the bounty of MORE!!!, we have only this benediction: We hope you fucking choke on it, you motherfuckers.

Tao Lin IKEA

IN THE FUTURE, 93.7 % of Ikea's graphic design will be based upon Tao Lin's drawings of animals, and particularly his hamsters.

However, because this work will have passed into public domain, the Swedish giant will not credit his name, nor pay any money to his estate.

Like "George Bush" or "Britney Spears," he will be a name that haunts the tip of the tongue like a salt ghost.

They will refer to the maker of these drawings as "21Anyc" for 21st century anonymous creator based in New York City.

The brochures will say "It is rumored that 21Anyc spent his days listening to rain, or listening for rain. He seemed to speak for the animals before they acquired their Vocoders and inalienable animal rights. We hope you enjoy our inspired reinterpretations of these early 21st century classics. Available in polypropylene or synthesized gold."

Children will run to coddle the Vegan Muffin and beg in acquisitiveness.

Acquisitiveness will change forms slightly.

But it will never die.

Dog Translators, Cat Translators

IN THE FUTURE, dog translators and cat translators will make it much easier for us to understand our beloved pets. They will finally be able to tell us if something is hurting them (and where) or if they are hungry or cold, or if they are sorry for doodying the carpet or yakking up mouse bones in the foyer. All of this will come through a Vocoder-like device worn on a collar around their necks. The voice will be somewhat robotic but have optional softening effects to lend the effect of emotion to their utterances.

This means, of course, our pets will also be able to tell us of their day-to-day ennui & their sense of the futility of life.

In other words, our pets will soon have the ability to bring us down, to thoroughly depress us, as quickly and as efficiently as our spouse, life partner or other family routinely do.

It should come as no surprise then, that in the future the cities will be populated with millions of abandoned talking cats and dogs, all walking to and fro and loudly voicing their neurotic complaints about existence.

This will be the local color of the cities of the future. People will mostly learn to just tune it out and walk right through a crowd of cats vociferating on how horrible the weather is, how cruel life can be, and how he never really loved me at all, not really.

They will just walk right through and smile, with the blithe obliviousness of any mental health professional.