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.