THE FUTURE IS NOW.
THE WAIT IS OVER YOU HAVE ARRIVED. All prerequisites have been fulfilled and all forms completed and submitted. Your teeth are brushed your socks are clean your resume is up-to-date and the weather is just fine. Your acne has cleared, your broken heart has knitted, your addictions have faded to a manageable level. You finally found a hairstyle that works for you. All systems are go. Three two one blastoff.
THE FUTURE IS NOW.
The future, which you have been eagerly awaiting for 24 years, has proven to consist of mint juleps on the front porch with your mom, talking about politics, waiting to go to your job as a waitress at the café a mile down the road where you work with other local kids who aren't kids anymore and who, like you, have vague ideas about living at home while saving up for grad school or something equally definitive and good.
THE FUTURE was once constructed of romantic fragments and images including but not limited to being a roadie for the Butthole Surfers, running away to live a life of punk rock in San Francisco, buying a van and painting it sparkly gold and driving around the country with your pet pygmy goat, WWOOFing for eternity, and generally sticking it to the man.
THE MAN has revealed himself to be not a figure but a continuum, someone who exists in varying degrees as an element of pretty much everything. The man cannot be stuck it to because he cannot be pinned down. See, it’s all more complicated than you'd thought.
THIS ARTICLE IN HARPER'S that you read recently describes how the trees closest to the blast site at Chernobyl are still in exactly the same condition they were in when they were knocked down. See, the level of radiation is so high that the normal bacteria that facilitate decomposition can’t survive there, so instead of breaking down, the trees have been lying staid for the last 25 years, neither growing nor rotting, which makes people uncomfortable in about the same way that Botox makes people uncomfortable. If something isn’t moving it ought to be falling apart, right?
YOUR HOME WHEN YOU ARE NOT IN IT is something that makes you deeply and inexplicably sad. A lot of people say that they find comfort in that image when they're away, in the thought of their personal spaces waiting patiently and statically for them to return, maybe a few dust motes drifting or a fly thrusting at the window providing the only evidence that time is passing at all. There is a sense of servility in this image that you hate. It's the thought that these spaces exist for one reason and one reason alone: to serve man. In the absence of man they are utterly worthless. The same thing occurred to you when you waited on the porch for a taxi at 4AM and watched the streetlight on the corner cycling through its colors, even though there wasn't a single car anywhere and its sad efforts were doing no good for anyone. By making things for one singular purpose we deprive them of their dignity because once we leave they're doomed to just do the same shit over and over and over again, aware that they're worthless but unable to do anything about it.
I mean, at least in your imagination. You consider all the things in your storage closet. You think about how every single moment of your life when you aren't looking in the closet, every second that closet door is closed and you're busy doing stuff and seeing stuff and living, all the things in there are in pitch blackness, just waiting in the dark for you to need them. The fact that people find comfort in this thought, find it pleasing that all their possessions do nothing but wait to be activated, seems to you weirdly tyrannical and disturbing.
This is in some way related to more general and more human notions of anticipation, of waiting patiently – doing some Sudoku and slowly ripping up your coaster – for the future to arrive and active you.
THE FUTURE IS NOW and you are useful in the sense that you bring people food and that's good, and you know, maybe you bring a smile to their faces with your witty repartee and semi-problematic tendency to flirt with absolutely everyone. No type of usefulness should be totally dismissed.
UNLIKE YOUR THINGS, you have the ability to make your own usefulness. You know your Sartre, though, and you know that the freedom to construct your own sense of purpose is laced with evil free-floating anxiety and angst and the desire to go play Peter Pan at your mum's house because the responsibility that goes along with that freedom is sometimes daunting, when you think about it too hard, which is all the time.
THEY ALWAYS TALK about "grabbing life by the balls," and you always hate that kind of adage because it doesn’t fucking mean anything. Advice should be followable. Where are life's balls? You will grab them if someone will show you.
THE FUTURE IS NOW and it is to be savored and sucked on and gnawed lustily, because the future is Now and Later. The future is in fact a lame pun, and it needn't be more.
THE HATERS GONNA HATE and you best pay them no nevermind.
THE FUTURE IS NOW AND YOU ARE FUCKING ROCKING IT.
