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. 

My Personally, Most Viscerally Disdained Tropes of the Writing Life, Installment 23,117

Today’s trope hanging on my metaphorical kill chain is “Tee-hee, I’m a writer, I do research on weird stuff, don’t hold my web browser history against me Mr. FBI Man/Ms. Polite Society!” Miss me with that weaksauce. I don’t read messed-up stuff because I’m a writer. I’m a writer because I like reading messed-up stuff. Whether anyone else approves is irrelevant. 

Alas, I forget the source for this image.

Pornography repulses me, but the socially unacceptable attitudes I enjoy reading on the outlaw chan boards would get me in as much trouble with the today’s secular, but no less religiously fanatical New Church. I generally “hide my power level,” which is the chan board expression for “don’t let people know what you really think about things,” but it’s been my observation that, if someone wants you in trouble badly enough, they’ll get you in trouble, so it doesn’t bear worrying too much about. 

That said, the usual commonsense rules apply: be judicious, be discerning, choose your battles. Never apologize for how you feel or what you believe. As for how much anyone needs to know how you feel or believe...go back to those first three on the list.

A Visit from the Ghost of Churchgoing Sundays Past

Alas, if only Sunday School was ever remotely this fun, let alone educational and uplifting. The grim reality was finding yourself squirreled away in a room with a couple of aggressively unattractive, never-married women who had nothing better to do than to volunteer watching the kids so the normal, well-adjusted grownups could be good and bored to death somewhere else.

The maddening boredom was a feature, not a bug of the overall church-going experience. Along with your collection plate money, it was part of the penance you paid for whatever moments you may have enjoyed in the previous week. Maybe for even actual sins. The ennui certainly felt powerful enough to redeem any one or more of the Seven Deadlies.

Look, I’m not knocking church. All I’m saying is there are reasons people quit going, and treating Sunday School for the young ones as an afterthought is one. 

Eew on the Spew Crew

Remember when George Carlin would question popular expressions in his comedy act and make people laugh as he demonstrated the stupid, poorly thought-out assumptions behind them all? Of course not. I was thinking of him when I wrote this, though, and how almost no one knows who Richard Pryor is anymore. Two of the greatest outlaw comedians of all time, down the memory hole. Anyway....

As someone who never outgrew his childish delight in onomatopoeia and comic book sound effects, I cherish the word “spew.” The very “eew” sound at the end suggests something awful. As a noun and a verb, the word describes something viscerally disgusting sprayed with propulsive force, also satisfying my delight in form and utility.

Therefore it is especially offensive to me to hear how hate is spewed. Like vomit, I get that hate (but never hatred, oddly) is something distasteful, but “spewing hate” was a threadbare expression over a quarter-century ago around the time of the riots in Los Angeles after the verdict in the Rodney King trial, when both law enforcement and ghetto blacks were accused, again and again, of barfing up ill intent upon each other.

How does one spew hate, anyway? It’s not the sort of thing that sticks to walls and pools on floors and makes everything smell so sour others are gagging and fit to puke, too.

Hate is made to sound as if there’s a virus in all that spew that one might catch involuntarily, which is why this is used as an excuse to censor and de-platform people with unfashionable views. This is, of course, as disingenuous as it is silly. 

On the opposite side of the coin, consider how love is propagated. Love is generally spread, like a sweet jam. Or a virus, too, though no one thinks of it like that.

Honestly, though, can you think of anyone who has spread love? Spewed so much love it spread like a virus steaming from hot vomit, so much so that entire nations fell ill with...love?

As always, flip the script and it’s immediately obvious how ludicrously obtuse any given popular delusion is. As always, the True Believers shut down like toddlers overdue for their naps when confronted with the truth. 

We note the idiocy, we smirk at the idiocy, we move on. Here’s a photo of Gal, the big shaggy cat who rules the Blue Porch Wild Kitty Committee. 

What, you were expecting a photo of...spew? When the dark and disgusting is de riguer, happy and wholesome becomes edgy. I’ve always been of a contrarian mindset.

Early Adopter Technology and the Living Dead

Does your zombie novel have flying cars? Mine will. 

First off, fear not, this won’t hold my latest book up any longer than it’s been held up. It’s just that I have a couple of e-subscriptions to cutting-edge aviation mags (long story) and believe me, there are some serious people paying serious attention to the problem of our shameful lack of flying cars in this 21st century. Don’t get too excited, though, unless you’ve the got the kind of jack and juice a CEO or a hedge-fund manager would have, the kind that “needs” to go directly from the company rooftop to the company jet at the airport without dealing with the common traffic below.

Anyway, I saw this photo and realized, “Hey, Derek and his peeps will be in one of the Redoubts where all the billionaires and almost-billionaires retreated to when the dead arose to eat the flesh of the not so well connected. The elite of these elite will have flying cars, because why not?” [grinning most Grinchily] “Now, what kind of action set-piece can I write involving flying cars and vast hordes of flesh-eating re-animated dead?” 

I’m already employing other science-fictiony elements that are actual devices that have yet to come into wide use, but would already be perfected and enjoyed among the kind of people for whom the apocalypse is an inconvenience at worst. I just got another toy for my trippy little toybox. THE WRONG KIND OF DEAD is going to be so sick, in both conventional and colloquial uses of the word.