Roger Pires Jan 07, 2010
When he's not offering his take on daily life, Roger Pires spends his days as a computer systems analyst. It's not exactly a glamorous calling but hey, it pays the bills. He enjoys hockey, canoeing, snowshoeing, and spending as much time as he possibly can outdoors. He lives in Udora with his wife and two kids, who are his prime inspiration for Ravenshoe Ramblings.
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Ten years after
2010. Feels like the number of pounds I’ve gained over the Christmas break. It is, of course, the year we recently ushered in amid a hail of champagne corks.
Remember trying to stay awake to welcome in the year 2000? Well, that was ten years ago, my friends. The intervening decade is now a hazy memory. The years have melded together like cornfields on the way to the cottage. You remember passing signposts and landmarks along the way but one roadside fruit stand starts to look just like the next. You ask yourself, “Did I go bald before I went grey?” and “Exactly when did my kid stop playing with dolls and start driving my car?”
The New Millenium has lost that showroom smell. It was cool to rhyme off the inaugural years: oh-one, oh-two, oh-three…. Now we’re in that awkward second decade when they tumble out like a mouthful of marbles: twenty-ten, twenty-eleven, twenty-twelve…. Sounds more like a game of “Chubby Bunny” than the dawn of new age.
So, how did we get here? How did we weave our way through the chicanes and hair-pin turns of the twentieth century into the straightaway of the twenty-first? How did we survive so many threats to our existence: world wars, terrorism, disco music? Maybe The Creator has equipped us to bend but not break. Perhaps we made it through sheer, dumb luck. Heck, maybe the guy peddling “Sham Wow” on late-night television has something to do with it. We knew we’d get here somehow; we just imagined it to look a whole lot different.
I remember being a kid in the back seat of my parents’ candy-apple red Pontiac Parisienne. Humanity hadn’t yet felt the need for seat belts or air conditioning. I still couldn’t foresee the day when the back of my thighs didn’t melt into the vinyl seats during a July road trip. But before the Parisienne pulled up to the shores of Lake Simcoe, I had already traveled a million miles. A stack of books and magazines with articles on the future stood in for the car radio – a luxury in those pre-historic times. They contained glossy artists’ conceptions of cities in outer space. They depicted daily shuttle service from New York to domed cities on Mars. There would be video phones and wall-to-wall TVs. Press a button and Christmas dinner would appear out of a hole in the wall. Traffic jams and their white knuckle frenzy would give way to people in slick body suits floating off to Shangri-La in their hover cars. I read all the big names in future fantasy: Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein, and – when my parents weren’t looking – Hefner. They all had visions of the year 2000. And none of them involved rush hour on the DVP turning into a tailgate party.
Ten years after the arrival of the distant, idealized future, we know why they call it science fiction. We still battle bumper-to-bumper traffic in carbon-spewing behemoths, hoping the stressed-out guy in the car next to us doesn’t turn our weekend into an episode of Cops. We can make that road trip to Simcoe in half the time it takes to cross the city at rush hour.
They got one thing right, though. We’ve become a generation of cyber-junkies. Technology’s children. We can now watch TV on our way to the cottage. The cornfields of our youth have been replaced by episodes of House. The signposts and landmarks have been obliterated by laptops, iPods, and text messaging. The back seat is now Mission Control.
The “future” used to be a big number flashing in bright neon lights: “2000”. We were like kids counting down the number of sleeps until Christmas, imagining what we would find under the tree. We are now living in the morning after. Anticipation has given way to apathy.
So we look for a new milestone - the new future we can idealize and fantasize about. Will it be the year 2100 and will any of us still be here to see the finished product? Hey, there’s only so much you can do with silicone. How about “3000: The Third Millenium”? Too far away. Besides, I think Steven Spielberg already has the rights to it.
Now would be a good time to admit that I have no such ideal. My long-term vision of the future is to decide at five o’clock what I’m going to order on my pizza at six. I stopped reading science fiction about the time I had to explain to my kids what an LP is. The only resolution I make is to thank The Lord every morning I find myself upright. To me, 2010 is just a number. And even though it would take the fingers and toes of most of Parliament Hill to count to, I hold it in no special regard.
The future is now. Put the brochures away. We’ve arrived at our destination.
