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.