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.)