Vintage Complaints: “The Future Isn’t What It Used To Be”

It’s not the best of times. It’s not the worst of times, either, thank God.

Imagine growing up during the 1960s and you’re watching a TV show set in the 1980s with a giant, freaky nuclear submarine (loved those forward bow fins and searchlight-turned-laser cannon) carrying a fully submersible jet aircraft, and another show in which an entire family got lost in space trying to colonize Alpha Centauri in 1997. Even in Star Trek’s 23rd century (original flavor, accept no substitutes), we had World War III out of the way in the 1990s, and would be due for our first warp space flight a few decades from now in the 21st century. 

What gets me is these Irwin Allen shows would easily go on for three years or more despite their jaw-droppingly awful writing (all those wonderful concepts and props wasted!) while the original Star Trek struggled to stay on every year it aired. Even the famously excruciating Lost in Space would have gotten a fourth season had Allen not inadvertently insulted a west coast network honcho.

According to science fiction in print and media clear into the 1970s, the 1990s were going to be huge. Instead of Khan Noonien Singh, blaster pistols, and the start of the Martian Chronicles, we got grunge, Bill Clinton, Windows 95/98, and online shopping. I’m over it, myself—the ability to shop and pay bills online was was a major change for good—but you can see how some people might be feeling a little put-out.

So what do we have to look forward to? Duct-fan propelled air taxis that can lift vertically like a helicopter and zip across town like a jet? A reality TV show featuring Mars’ first human colonists?

That’s about the best I can think of. I’d like to think of better.

I remember laughing aloud at the title of this song as it seemed so appropriate in the dark years immediately after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. “People Used to Dream About the Future.” Now even our dreams are remakes or “re-imaginings.”

It’s got to turn around sometime. I just hope I live so long.

Burps in the Road

Inspirational, super-motivational burps! #7 will make you sweat pure vinegar! 

You wouldn’t know it to follow this blog, but I’m actually still quite invested in my Christmas/New Year’s resolutions, with only a week to go in February. 

With everything else in my life going on, e.g., dead furnaces in subzero January cold, pipes frozen the entire length of the house, busted Jeep idler pulleys with mystery drive belt size (what was supposed to fit, didn’t), cracked windshields, et al., I got hung up on telling the tale of how I fell off the wagon in terms of maintaining a daily posting schedule (this wasn’t a resolution, but that I managed 18 days straight of quality posts was quite the Christmas miracle) as well as beer ragers that same night. It was a funny story, but requiring too much exposition to translate said humor to an audience. 

The funniest thing I can relate is learning that I use social media to lurk more than interact. I made the mistake of “waving back” at someone who waved at me on Facebook, and found myself in mortal terror of interacting with someone while half-drunk. I am hardly sociable under optimal conditions. The very idea of interacting while impaired with anyone outside my extremely tight orbit of family and friends absolutely mortifies me.

Of all the things in my life that requires squaring away—and some degree of turning around—that would be the one. I’ve got to develop a working policy towards dealing with people. I was always a somewhat odd, socially autistic duck to start, but all this time alone is really making me dysfunctional.

Whatever issues I have, I’ve always prided myself on being functional.

The bearings within went bad, then exploded out the hard rubber seal. The pulley seized, and the serpentine belt unscrewed the pulley. For all the pieces of metal and rubber flying around under the hood the damage could have been much, much worse.

Things are going well on the creative front, but they need to go faster. The furnace is working. My Jeep is operational. We’re almost done with February. I need this book out by summer.

It’s just a matter of re-establishing control, which can be done with one simple trick (people hate me with the white-hot fury of a thousand suns for this!):

Don’t give up. 

Green grass and warm, sunny skies will return. Better have something to show for it when they do.

The Never-Ending Twilight of the Living Dead Simpsons

The many men, so beautiful! 
And they all dead did lie: 
And a thousand thousand slimy things 
Lived on; and so did I.

—S. T. Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Part IV, Stanza 3

I knew I’d written about this ambulatory rotting corpse of a show sometime ago, so I looked it up and discovered I’d made a post in October 2013. Here we are again, already another half-decade later, with an meme more apt than ever:

Homer’s expression is so apropos. From the Unprofessional Madman Facebook page.

Thirty-one, 32 seasons. Thirty-one, 32 years. Three decades and change. 

Five U.S. presidential administrations, starting early in the term of recently deceased George H.W. Bush.

Baby Maggie would be in her early 30s now. Bart and Lisa would be securely middle-aged. Homer would be dead, either of occupational cancer or obesity-driven heart failure.

Why, oh why? How can this possibly go on? Like NBC’s The Tonight Show and Saturday Night Live, it’s as if someone forgot to pull the plug on these vegetables long after the EEG flatlined into brain death.

It gets worse. Consider that one generation ago (generations generally measured in 30 year increments), this show began as an act of brazen defiance and mockery of the phony Cosby Show pieties of the 1980s. One generation later, the character who ran the Quik-E Mart is being phased out in craven deference to the even phonier pieties of the current age — despite the fact that the character, funny accent aside, has always been a man of laudable integrity. With their knees bent and heads bowed to the screeching purple-haired Creeps of the New Church, soul and spine were exhausted from this show decades ago already. 

The irony is just a little too ironic here. 

Still The Simpsons persists, a shambling, living-dead parody of the living satiric glory it once was. In the end, all anyone will remember this once ground-breaking show for is as that sometimes-funny cartoon that went on forever and ever and no one knows why.