the new future

I had weird spaceship dreams the past couple nights. The other night it was aboard the Starship Enterprise and Jean Luc Picard was leading a meeting about how the crew's street clothes were too 'nineties'. It was all because Deanna Troy was wearing some belly-baring top with a denim bolero and high-waisted jeans (with her big hair). It was hideous, I have to admit. He said we needed to really go 'futuristic' with our daily fashions, even when off the clock. I agreed.

every decade has their own version of how they want the future to look. What is the contemporary 'futuristic'? It seems like today, people are more concerned with re-discovering fashions from the past. They are less occupied with the futures of the sixties and eighties (spaceships androids, and flying cars) and are now romanticizing the gold rush, prospecters, and "cowboys'n'indians". We're looking back to times before plastic, computer chips, and overpopulation. Before bedbug protection ads on mass transit. Back when people still got lost in the woods and never found their way out. When someone could be raised by wolves. When you could find a plot of land, dig in the earth, and build a house. Anywhere. Because it didn't belong to anyone. It was wide open earth without claims. And all people owned were their stock and the shirts on their backs. And maybe a peppermint stick or two.

But today there's just too much stuff. Too many people. It seemed impossible 50 years ago that it would even be possible to have any effect on this planet. The solution to pollution was dilution. But even the smartest minds of any generation are working with the accepted truths of the the generations prior. It stays that way until someone makes a mistake and accidentally proves one of those truths false. And then the new truth takes its place, for the time being. Our minds are too short to see the whole picture. We have no real concept of time. Our lives are stop-motion and all our years of living only form a few moments of memories. It's just too easy to forget. We're being flooded in tiny houses with hundreds others, and the door is blocked with all the stuff we've been meaning to get rid of.

I think it's very telling that the boys are wearing their waistcoats and bowler hats, while the women are dressing straight out of grandma's closet. That people are growing gardens on their city rooftops and going back to more archaic, simple arts and crafts. Rich people are moving to the forests and buying land to build their homestead and simple life, and the creative are moving to cities and making their own clothes, brewing their own beer, growing their own food, and building houses with garbage. People are sick of being told what to do, and so their finding their own ways. The more our society establishes rules that speak only to the masses, creates litigation and eliminates extenuating circumstance, the people feel as though this society isn't for them. We don't fit into any of the demographics. We're not being sold to. So we have to create our own bowers and do things the way we'd like them to be done. There are so many of us. We are everywhere.