We were promised flying cars.

Roughly a year ago, I posted a series of status updates, imagining what, when I was a child, I thought 2011 would actually look like, not what we actually got. I mean, serious, facebook? twitter? ipads? These are what you pitifully call game changers? These are what qualify as high-tech? You call this the future? Where's the moon bases, the androids, the rocket packs, the flying cars?! We were promised flying cars.

So, with a little help from my friends, I posted as though this was the actual 2011 that we should've gotten--consider it the 2011 we wanted, not the 2011 we deserved. I've rescued some of these posts, comments and all (original post in quotation marks, comments in the bullets), from the nether-regions of facebook, to preserve them for posterity...in the nether-regions of some blog. Behold!

"For Malcolm X Day, we sailed the space-clipper USS Margaret Thatcher along the solar winds to Jupiter, to see the monolith that's been receiving strange radio-signals from the moon for, oh, 10 years now. This is also where Major Tom mysteriously disappeared--his famous last words were "Tell my wife I love her very much..."

• Jacob: She knows, Major Tom, she knows...

• David Harris: What a joke! Malcolm X Day!?! It was only renamed thus in 1999. Before then it was John Carter Day. But no, since he was a Confederate Astronaut, it's just not Newspeak enough, so we have to change it. That's so doubleplusungood.
  

Anyway, did you get any good polaroids of the Monolith?

• Jacob: Not really--turns out it's just a giant black rectangle floating in space, so none of my photos turned out. giant tourist trap, I tell you what; you couldn't even get that close to it, what with the homicidal computer singing "Daisy" and all.

"Appears our fears of the droid uprising were unfounded; Skynet and the Matrix have destroyed each other in an ideological spat over whether twas more preferable to merely enslave humanity for battery power, or retroactively kill our rebel leaders through time-travel. Now my most pressing dilemma be in how to most profitably spend my Spring Break: the transporter room or the holodeck?"

• Elliot Walters: I'm still not comfortable with the idea of being disassembled molecule by molecule so I'm for the Holodeck. You have to turn the safety protocols down though or it's just not that exciting. Might I suggest some Sherlock Holmes? Or perhaps diving with the alpha centaurian laser sharks? I for one will be travelling back to the 1300's to perform "magic tricks" with my transmographer and to mack on some princesses.

• Jacob: The holodeck is still a little too matrixy for me; and last thing we need is another sentient Moliarte. And I didn't say I'd actually be disassembling my OWN molecules--no, I'll be transporting cats, tomatoes, pet rocks, bags of dog-poo, etc. into friends' beds, showers, cars, you know, the usual pranks! I might even transport a couple people I don't like onto nude beaches!

• Steven Fendry: My lunar break will be spent at the asteroid range breaking in my new quantum nuclear particle decimator, fully automatic of course. With the power of thirteen and a half white dwarfs, my baby could destroy a system of 56 parsecs in 1 nanosecond. I was hoping to take it planet hunting with my friends during the next solar revolution, but thanks to those damn democratic-republicans there is a waiting period before I can purchase ammunition for it. I mean what kind of patriots are they anyway? It’s my science given right to carry my weapon on my key chain for self-defense. SO what if it has a scope, a thousand round magazine, armor piercing rounds… and a silencer. That is what the founding Mothers, and Fathers intended when they meant the right to bear arms. But I digress.

"Balderdash! I called customer service on my videophone, concerning my malfunctioning automaton, and what do I get? A twin-headed, multi-tentacled trans-dimensional energy being, faking a New England accent and claiming his name is Reginald!"

• Jacob: When will President Rockefeller IV cease outsourcing all our jobs to Mars? It's bad enough they can immigrate here illegally through the holes in the space-time continuum and steal our fruit-picking jobs!

• Elliot Walters: I hear that by 2050 the martians will out number humans 10 to 1. Can you imagine that a martian as president of Earth? That is, of course, if the droids don't rise up...again. I cannot sit through another droid assimilation lecture.

• David Harris: The illegal-alien-rights activists always say that humans just will not take those jobs. Absurd! I know of a baker's dozen red-blooded young gents who would jump at the chance to pick the giant tomatoes, or harvest the soylent green. Sure, jovians might be better suited for work in atomic reactor piles, but we're in a recession, by Jove! Our dapper young men can handle the beta radiation! As to the droid troubles, my sympathies lie with the up-and-coming Butlerian Jihad Party. Also, here's one anti-robot propaganda film I can get behind. I saw it on the newsreel.

http://www.hulu.com/watch/4510/futurama-anti-robot-propaganda

• Jacob: Not to mention that the necessity for mentats following the destruction of all computers will create a booming new sector of job creation! Oh, wait, the Butlerian Jihad party?? Go ahead, waste your vote!

"Blast! It appears the global-weather-control satellites are malfunctioning again! Is this what my tax monies pay for?! (Nevermind that the Federsation has switched to a moneyless economy, this be no excuse for shoddy service!)"

"Quite the conundrum! Shall I spend my latest stock dividends upon a sleek new hoverboard with which to impress the ladies, or upon a more utilitarian rocket-pack, with which to fly to work? Ah, the endless dilemmas of the future!"

• David Harris: I myself just purchased a 2011 Homer from Powell Motors:

http://images.wikia.com/simpsons/images/0/05/TheHomer.png

• Jacob: Ah, the Homer, truly the chariot of the Gods! Will you be outfitting it with the anti-gravity features? I just beheld a wild-haired old man adapt a vintage '85 Delorean with flight-thrusters and a Mr. Fusion!

"Ah, I am much enjoying the Beatle's 50th album! Who would have thought that, after all they have been through--the near break-up in '70, the attempt on Sir John Lennon's life in '80, George Harrison's transformation into a Bodhisattva in '96--they would still be making gorgeous, revolutionary music together"

• Jacob: I'm also keen on the latest collaboration between Jimi Hendrix and Tupac Shakur, as well as the forthcoming solo albums from Kurt Cobain and Elliot Smith! It makes one wonder how music would be different if Michael Jackson hadn't been cut down so quickly after "Thriller," or if Beethoven had never been cloned and reanimated!

• David Harris: I'll buy any 8-track with a keytar-theremin-hydraulophone-holophonor quartet.

• Lili Hall: This is a good status, but what does it have to do with the future that is supposed to be now? (The now that is supposed to be the future?) You're veering from your course!

• Jacob; It's not about the future, Lili you silly goose, it's about what the present SHOULD look like! Now if you don't mind, I'm going to listen to Beethoven's clone's latest techno LP on the grammaphone, while I fly my auto-zeppelin to the Democratic Alliance of Muslim States--I hear Persia is lovely this time of year!

• Lili: right right. haha (I thought it had to be stuff that had actually been published--in the past--about what today would be like...) (And I was confused about this album you were mentioning...assumed it was some new mash-up or something, hahaha--I mean, they did managed to produce this after Lennon's death): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7twIF8PWic

• Lili: ...I wonder what each of the Beatles' music would've sounded like if they'd each gone their separate ways? ;-P (trying to play along after my silly goose-ish-ness)

• Jacob: I know! Or if the members of Wyld Stallyn had flunked out their high school history test, never formed their band, and thus never ushered in our present utopic society!

• David Harris: Speaking of that, one of my roommates just got a new air guitar. Hopefully he doesn't play it while I am trying to cryosleep.

• Ben Gillis: You really think the Beatles' music is still gorgeous and revolutionary? After Ringo quit, his solo career kind of eclipsed the music they were making, in my opinion. All of his repressed ideas came bubbling to the surface... In any case 50 years of songwriting does tend to drain one of creative ideas. Plus the cybernetic arm Lennon has to play with ever since the assassination attempt gives his music a lifeless feel.

• Jacob: I'm not saying they haven't had their ups and downs--the whole ill-advised Beatles disco album is best left forgotten. But ever since they added Bill Clinton on drums, I really feel like they've charted new sonic territory! Ringo's solo work is pretty legit though, I grant you that.

• Lili Hall: Jacob, I thought you were a better judge of music... I think it's all gone pretty far downhill.. That song featuring the 12-minute saxophone solo by Clinton? *Shudder* I think they would have been better off if they'd have stopped while they were ahead, like in the late 70's, early 80s...

Happy Malcolm X Day everyone!

I is a Writer!

I is a writer! A friend posted a couple a couple essays of mine on his website, here and here! One's about Low, the others' about collapsing false binaries between LDS lit and the literary tradition ala TS Eliot. They're like blog posts except I put more than 10-minutes of effort into 'em, and actual strangers have read them voluntarily! You should read my friend's essays as well.

I take my moments of validation where I can get them.

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A tolerable pastiche of his poetry would not be impossible.

But, what sets him apart as a real poet (as opposed to some smart-aleck with a key-board like myself) is a surprising and disarming tenderness that shines through because of, not in spite of, his typographical violations. It is this talent of his which is least replicable, as in the following piece, which stopped me dead on the middle of the page:

if there are any heavens my mother will(all by herself)have

one. It will not be a pansy heaven nor

a fragile heaven of lilies-of-the-valley but

it will be a heaven of blackred roses

-e.e. cummings (p. 353)

And A Happy New Year

I had an English teacher in High School who came to the field late in her career; when I asked her why she switched, she said the corporate world is a never-ending slog of interrelated projects continually blurring into each other. Teaching offered definite starts and ends, beginnings and conclusions, finishes and renewals.

Now, one might then argue that a problem with our educational system is that it doesn't prepare our students for the "real" world, where none such regular breaks exist--but which real world, I might ask?

For I argue that it's our modern-world's state of constant indeterminate-ism that is artificial and unreal; the Natural World, by contrast, is a series of cycles, turns of seasons, Springs and Winters, blossoms and falling leaves, equinoxes and solstices, births, deaths, and rotations around the sun. The Natural World itself is a world of definite starts and ends, beginnings and conclusions, finishes and renewals. We humans be the only ones concerned with constructing static, artificial realms of never-ending slogs.

Farmers, the ones who actually feed us and maintain our existence, are constantly in tune with this cycle of stages--and our present education system was originally a-tuned to the farmers. If we consider such a world unrealistic, well, perhaps that's because we are so unnatural.

All this is just a round-about way of saying Happy New Year--for the passing of a New Year is otherwise an utterly arbitrary thing, right? The Chinese, the Jews, many cultures, have different random New Year starting points, none more valid than any other. Jan 1 2012 is, functionally, no different from Dec 31 2011.

Yet though our new-year assignations are arbitrary, the spirit of it is wholly appropriate and natural--for we've created a clear break, a new beginning, a fresh start. We are conforming to the pattern of nature. We have chosen to renew--even if it's only a renewal of calenders, that's at least something.

Happy New Years.