Last Saturday I took the girlfriend to see the “Rocky Horror Picture Show” – I hadn’t been to a showing in an actual theater in almost a decade.
Needless to say it was an eye opener.
I first saw “Rocky” when I was 16 years old – back then it seemed like a rite of passage for a teenage geek. Nearly everyone in my small clique of friends had already seen it and to hear them talk of it, it was like being initiated into the Knights Templar – a spiritually transforming process that left them enlightened and connected to a deeper community. Or at least that that’s what I kept getting from them telling me how much I’d “love” seeing it. Friend after friend would regale me with stories of bawling insults at the movie screen, throwing toast, and men in fishnet stockings. There was nothing our teenaged heads had for a frame of reference at the time – this was in the days before the internet, so we couldn’t exactly scour Reddit and 4chan for bizarre means of entertaining and titillating our adolescent minds.
So finally, under the pretenses that I was going to be spending the night at a friend’s house, we made the trek to the Clinton Street Theater – who has been showing the movie almost continually since it debuted in 1975. Originally opened in 1915 as one of the first cinemas in the Portland area, it now plays mostly second-run and art-house fare. “Rocky” has always been on the Clinton’s marquee – and on more than a few occasions it was the theater’s bread and butter. There was an enormous crowd at the entrance – or at enormous for the size of the venue (nearly 50 people!) I remember being surrounded by disaffected teens and 20-year olds wearing black pants and t-shirts from goth concerts with a snarky button pinned to them. And a lot of cigarette smoke.
But – as with all good things – there was a catch.
While “Rocky” would offer me the possibility of seeing a cabaret performer’s nipple slip out of her bodice, there would be a human cost for watching the longest running glam rock musical since “The Phantom of the Paradise”. For those who haven’t been to a showing of “Rocky” in a theater, most venues that show it regularly have a ceremonial “de-virginization” where the uninitiated are processed into the cult of the Midnite Movie. Among the many stories that my friends would tell me of their “Rocky” experiences would be the ceremonial humiliation of the “Rocky virgin” – like being auctioned off to the lowest bidder, faking an orgasm in public, and the “dancing tampon”. But the form of abasement that I worried about was an “ass judging contest.” If you were to ask me, I’d say it was because I was insecure about my appearance – combined with the idea that I might have to actually drop trou and bare my posterior to a laughing audience. So while I socialized before the doors opened, my friends would occasionally nudge me and go “ass judging contest” to me to make me blush.
And then the doors opened and we filed into the cinema. I had always seen the old theaters in movies from the 1940’s and 1950’s – and while it wasn’t the Radio City Music Hall, it felt like I was being taken back a few decades. My friends and I took our seats and waited for the show to start. The MC came onto the stage, welcomed us all to another showing, and introduced the pre-show cabaret acts – where a man dressed in Adam Ant’s cast-offs would lip synch to Oingo Boingo’s “Little Girls”. But then came the dreaded baptism into “Rocky” culture – as my friends drug me up on stage with the rest of the “virgins” to lose what little dignity I had left.
A woman (who also played a role in the Rocky Cabaret) came out and started doling out random, but minor, degradations to select groups on stage. Don’t ask me what they were, I was so anxious about the possibility of having to show my buttocks in public, I wasn’t even paying attention to what has happening around me. Finally I was left with three other guys who were also waiting with nervous anticipation to participate in the “Gong Show” style antics that awaited us. Our hostess paced down the line and stopped at me, saying “Don’t worry about the ass judging contest, you already won.”
I can’t describe the mixture of relief and exhilaration I felt at that moment. Not only did I not have to worry about exposing myself, but I had received the first complement about my physical appearance in my teenage years. (Yes, others would soon follow, but I had no way of knowing that.) Having put aside my fears, I knew that whatever task I was going to perform in front of the gallery, I would give it my all.
After a few minutes of deliberation, she finally said, “I want you gentlemen to perform for us, ‘I’m A Little Teapot.'”
My fellow initiates were perplexed – they had either never heard of the rhyme, or for some reason it was beneath them. So I started without them, hoping to spur them into joining me. It became apparent that I was going to be the only person performing this little ditty, however, as my fellow participants started to shy away from me. Now emboldened by not having to bare myself, I said the refrain again – in the style of one of the “Gumby’s” from “Monty Python”. Needless to say, there was raucous applause, I was greatly relieved, and I got a pass to a free movie at the theater that wasn’t “Rocky”. (I never used it, having kept it hung up on my corkboard as a trophy throughout high school.)
Then the lights dimmed, the movie came on, and I fell in love. I loved the music (“Science Fiction Double Feature” is my favorite number from the show), and screaming excoriating remarks at the movie allowed me to fulfill all of my Mystery Science Theater 3000 fantasies. But more than anything that stuck out was the fact I didn’t feel like an outcast.
The problem with being a geek in high school is how quickly you get ostracized. I eschewed team sports for role playing games, I paid more attention to computers than academia, and most of my friends were in either band or drama (two of the bigger geek magnets high school has to offer). With the exception of a few close chums, most of the people I went to school with had difficulty finding common ground with me. Let’s face it, you get lonely enough just being a teenager without the added stigma of being labeled a freak as well. “Rocky” was one of the few social circles where I no longer felt like I was the weirdo because I didn’t have a professional sports team on my shirt. In fact, I was encouraged to be as different and unique as I wanted to be – something about a movie starring a omnisexual transvestite tends to bring an air of tolerance. Throughout my high school years and well into my 20’s, I would return back to the Clinton for another viewing of “Rocky”. A lot of the time I didn’t even watch the movie, I just hung around outside and socialized with my fellow deviants, basking in the warmth of acceptance. I even joined the cabaret when I was 23 for a year – and I had a ball.
Fast forward to last weekend.
One thing I have been finding more and more after I turned 35 is how the years have been giving me perspective – whether I want it or not. I looked at my fellow theater-goers and I realized that I was at least a decade senior to most of them. Many of them were still in high school and I couldn’t help but look at them with bemused detachment. I saw the conversations they were having and while the words had changed, the meaning was still there – these were people still looking forward to this showing of “Rocky” because it was an excuse to get their freak on. Not in a sexual sense, but rather to connect with people who didn’t use the word “weird” as an insult.
We went in and sat down and I watched the social groups chatting amongst each other. Oingo Boingo had now been replaced by “Gangnam Style” – and most of the geekism were contemporary (there was a man dressed like Matt Smith’s incarnation of Doctor Who). In fact, when the movie played, the script of insults I was used to had now been updated and included more topical references than I was familiar with.
While most people would get mired in depression about being out of date and no longer au curant, I realized that “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” was really made for the young. It’s a perfect venue for one to express parts of yourself that you don’t always have opportunity to show around your peers – which is something that a lot of people need in their teens and 20’s. The entire 10 year span from 15 to 25 is one long session of “Who The Fuck Am I?” And though a lot of people are able to muck their way through it having already been accepted by default from family and friends – there are those of us (geeks) that need some outlet, some group or venue, where being obscure and witty is the norm and welcomed.
And I thank the fates in charge that places like that still exist.
Let’s face it, it feels like we were gypped. Here we are, now living in the time of THE FUTURE! that our parents grew up with and for what? No robot servants, no flying cars. Hell, we barely even have a space program, let alone fashion that is primarily based on velour and gold lamee. For living in the future world of the 21st Century, things still pretty much suck.
However, it’s not your parents’ fault (even if their generation did screw up the environment and economy). In fact, while people like Asimov, Heinlein, and Roddenberry did their best to portray the world of the future as shiny, carefree, and filled with large-breasted, brightly-hued women wanting to know more about human mating rituals – it’s not really their fault that their portrayal of coming events was about as accurate as a drunken 4-year old with a lawn dart.
5 – Technology is a Fickle Mistress.
About a hundred years ago, when the Wright Brothers made their historic first flight, the idea of air-based travel that didn’t have the word “balloon” in it was largely laughed at. But today if you were to hear someone openly criticize the practicality of air travel because everywhere can be navigable by railway, your first reaction would be to wonder how this person was allowed to step out in public without his “special helmet”.
It’s hard to say what new technology is going to be sexy in future, not even the futurists seem to get that right. In the original series of Star Trek, the ship’s central computer allows voice command, but in a couple episodes you can see a character using a slide rule (ask your grandparents, kids) right next to the computer panel. Now you may say that it’s because Trek was done in the 1960’s when people only had a vague idea of what computers did in the first place, so let’s take something a tad more contemporary.
The movie Strange Days was released in 1995 and takes place on New Year’s Eve of 1999. According to the movie: there’s an illegal technology that records a person’s sensory input; HD television is so commonplace that even a sleazy no-life drug dealer has one in his low-class apartment; and lastly, there’s no Internet. Okay granted, the sensory reading technology provides the Maguffin that gets the movie started; and yeah, in 1999 HDTV was available, but expensive (but the chance you saw it was at the house of your friend’s rich childless uncle, and he only used it to watch golf tournaments). But there is no Internet in the movie – something which probably would’ve made the movie even cooler or really stoopid. The reason why I’m flailing my arms and pointing this factoid out is this – Strange Days has the distinction of being one of the first movies to have its own promotional website. This was in 1995, when the bulk of the internet was occupied by college nerds exchanging pornography, NASA, and Al Gore. No one had even considered the Internet as a viable marketing tool back then (and for good reason, it was back when blinking text and animated backgrounds were considered innovative). Between the years of 1995 and 1999 (that’s four years, mind) the US would experience one of its biggest economic upswings, and all because the Internet made it happen. (Of course, we would later realize that all of those happy things that were supposed to happen because of the Internet would NOT happen, but that’s beside the point.)
What I’m driving at is this – too often you’ll see a cool device in a sci-fi movie or story that’s presented to the audience like it’s a prize being offered on Wheel of Fortune. This is especially true in earlier works, but even later shows like Battlestar Galactica find it difficult to resist the urge to show the audience how neato-keen a particular gee-gaw is. And it begs the question that’s so rarely answered: okay, it’s really neat that the gadget of the future does “x”, but how did that gadget affect the culture and economy it exists in? In the TNG Universe of Trek, they have a matter replicator – which they use most often like a microwave; but it’s a device that makes matter (matter being the stuff that stuff is made of). So with just one of these devices you could feed a family, or hell, a ZIP code. Conversely, if it’s able to replicate just about anything you tell it to, what about weapons? Or money? Or large-breasted, green skinned alien pornstars? When the television was made affordable to the average family in the mid-1950s, all of the sudden the whole family dynamic changed. “I’m having problems with my math homework, Dad” “Quiet, son, Chip Douglas is having girl trouble again.” If you had a hibachi-sized gadget that just required a three-prong outlet to make anything you wanted, what do you think would happen to your family then?
A corollary to this, and this has been mostly the case in sci-fi up until the late 1970s, is the idea that in the future, technology will solve the world’s problems. Well, as anyone who’s been caught in a Nigerian 419 scam can tell you, for as many problems a particular innovation solves – an equal number are created. Let’s get back to the Internet thing I talked about earlier. In the late 1990s, people were all mad-crazy about the net: it was creating jobs, making money, bringing us information (read: pornography), and it seemed that there was no industry that couldn’t be super-improved by adding a slice of Internet into it. But as we would discover at the Dawn of the New Millennium, most of that happy crap that sold us on the Internet in the first place was made up. In fact, for every legit net business, it turned out that there were three others who wouldn’t know a computer if they stuck their dick in it – but that didn’t stop them from getting money from venture capital investors, who knew even less about computers. (“So, you stick your penis into it? Tell me more.”) Once the investors woke up to the fact that there just isn’t any money in sticking your dick in the Internet (sorry, all you guys posting personals ads on Craigslist), they jumped ship and the Internet felt less like the magical land of Sid ‘N Marty Krofft and more like Pottersville in It’s a Wonderful Life.
And finally, one other thing that a lot of sci-fi programs seem to miss: for every successful technological concept that has been indoctrinated and accepted by the buying public, there are about a dozen or so “near misses”, “should’ve beens”, and “trendy knockoffs.” Got one word for ya: Betamax. It’s a punchline from the 1980’s nowadays. But if you take a good hard look, you find it was a product that was in many ways superior to VHS, but thanks to heavy litigation that was slanted away from the Japanese Beta manufacturers and more toward the US television/video industry, it quickly became a symbol of embarrassment. The same can be said for things like the Mini-Disc, ColecoVision, and HD-DVD. So where are the cheesy knockoffs of the phaser? Why does Riker never point out to Picard that he tried one of the early generation HoloMakers before the HoloDeck company took them over? Or have LaForge point out to Wesley Crusher that back in his day there was only one selection for nipples on his Remaker?
Speaking of bringing up the painfully obvious…
4 – Cultural Change Happens at Random
Over the course of human events, there are always dramatic shifts that just pop up out of nowhere. Now, yeah, in the comfort of the future we can look back on past events with a greater understanding of how a particular event came about, but a lot of that explanation is done by assumption and conjecture. Let’s take an obvious example of what I’m talking about.
Before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the US public was perfectly fine with the idea of just sitting it out. The horrors of World War I were still fresh in their minds, and really, what had those pesky Europeans done for us lately? Even in the US capital, every time a hawkish general would look at the embroiling conflict in France and Poland and suggest to someone we lend a hand, a White House chief would give him a weary look and say “But we were just in a war. It’s so far away. And no one’s really gonna attack us.” Fast-forward to the Day That Will Live In Infamy, and overnight the US had an army that was going to hightail it over to Europe and the South Pacific and whoop some ass. Gone were the nasty memories of trench foot, shellshock, field amputations, and mustard gas.
Now, many an armchair historian can (and probably will) list to me all of the socio-political/economic factors that led the human race inevitably toward another World War, but even when those are factored in it’s the human element that really decides what the outcome of a war is going to be. While a particular social/political/economic situation does make for a good recipe for warmongering, there several other points in human history where they didn’t.
War is a common topic in a lot of sci-fi stories, but when you hear of it being referred to in the past tense it’s usually in some term like “centuries ago.” Battlestar Galactica did an admirable job making the previous Cyclon War seem about as distant as the Vietnam Conflict nowadays, and Firefly had it’s own civil war as well, but they seem to be the exception. The problem with having a war in a particular story’s prehistory is that it’s rarely used in any other context than as a plot device. Rarely are there veterans in a particular show, and of those notable exceptions, they all seem to be borne out of the same “survivor” archetype that just made them better tacticians than emotionally/physically damaged. Where are the vets who still wake up in cold sweats years after surviving a Romulan sneak attack? Where is the guy missing body parts who is getting screwed over for health coverage by Federation’s version of VA? What about the guy who ties every single conflict and obstacle in his life, no matter how minor, to the Klingon War?
And cultural change doesn’t even mean war either. Let’s take the Exxon Valdez. Take one filled supertanker, a captain who has had one gimlet too many, and an Alaskan coastline willed with cute furry animals and see what you get. It was only after millions of gallons of crude had been vomited onto US shores did people start giving credence to the environmentalists at the time. For a little while it seemed that the unwashed, patchouli-smelling, guy with braided underarm hair had a point – the evil corporate bastards were going to fuck us in the ass and they didn’t even bother to check to see if we liked it first. True, after the mess was cleaned and the last otter was scrubbed, most of the public went about their business, but that singular event altered US culture by exposing more people toward pro-environmental thinking; which in turn created a new generation of annoying hippies that bray about the crimes of man against nature.
Frankly, most sci-fi programs hit the mark technology-wise more than they do culturally because while technological innovation has been moving steadily upward, human culture is about a random as Robin Williams on an eightball. And don’t even go blaming the media on this one folks: oftentimes all it took was one group of people setting their minds on something, and the next thing you know, we have the Reformation.
Where I’m driving at here is that a lot of sci-fi stories act like things have been status quo for the last thousand years. Unless the culture really is that stagnant, it’s not bloody likely. There are probably a dozen shifts in the culture that you can recall, minor and major, from the last 5 years than occur in the average sci-fi program. For crying out loud, the US has seen itself undergo an economic meltdown, elect a messianic African-American to its highest office, and lose a pop star of indeterminate ethnicity and gender. And that was just last year. How often to you hear the words “current events” occur in sci-fi? One series that comes to mind is Babylon 5, when in their famed 4th season the crew of B5 returned from saving the universe from a terrible threat only to find out that things on Earth have degenerated into an Orwellian wet dream.
True, the line of cultural evolution has been going upward, but it looks like it takes the same circuitous path to get there as the one you used when you had that case of Olde English and wound up asleep in your neighbor’s azalea bush.
Speaking of embarrassing acts…
3 – The Boldness of the Future Will Scandalize the Morals of the Past/The Carefree Ignorance of the Past Will Embarrass the Future
About a hundred years ago it was considered to risqué to see a woman’s ankles. In fact the dress code for the proper woman at the turn of the century would have been approved by the Sharia Court system in Pakistan. In the 1950’s pants on a woman were considered outrageous, and in the 1960’s a bare female midriff was edgy. Lord knows what they would’ve thought of whale tails and tramp stamps back then.
Face it, with each new generation comes a whole new set of standards for morality. In the 1970’s and 1980’s, sex was usually not expected until you had been dating a for a while. (I said usually). Nowadays, it’s more like a formality – most people know about a partner’s sexual history before they exchange what their food allergies are. In the 1950’s, the average couple didn’t worry about protection because it was expected that the only reason two people would share a bed, let alone rub genitals together, was to procreate – under the full supervision of the local clergy and neighborhood association. Safe sex was easier back then because the act of sex was considered repulsive at best and a pain in the ass at worst. (“You mean I actually have to let him in the bed with me? Won’t that wrinkle the sheets?”)
If you were to project the average person from the 1900’s into modern times, they would probably collapse into a convulsive after only a few minutes of broadcast television. At the turn of the century it was racy to see a woman’s bare shoulder – today a prime time program isn’t considered watchable until you see side-boob. The F-bomb was so offensive a hundred years ago, you’d be better off kicking someone in the groin in the middle of a conversation than using it. Nowadays, the word “fuck” is considered punctuation. (Ask anyone from New Jersey.)
Tattoos and body piercings are considered commonplace, but as little as ten years ago they were something that would rankle the elder generations. You may say that your tattoo is a personal statement of your soul, and your parents may counter that it’s just another fad that you’ll be embarrassed by ten years from now, but you can always remind them about how their folks reacted to the Beatles – or better yet, the libidinous gyrations of that rock-satyr Elvis? It doesn’t take a scientist to figure out that whole purpose of youth culture is to find something that provokes a reaction out of their elders and authority figures and run it into the ground. Well, guess what? In the ten-odd years it takes for those pesky teens to evolve into semi-responsible adults, that shocking behavior or trend that they displayed in response to you not letting them borrow the family car has now been absorbed into the general culture. Once the initial shock is over, society merely rolls with the punch that teenagers throw at them. (Worse yet, in twenty years that shocking/embarrassing thing you were really into as a teen gets relegated into the category of “nostalgia” and remarketed back to you again.) Sex is no longer described as “making whoopee” on TV game shows, now it’s “showing her my O-face.”
This is something that doesn’t happen in science fiction. Culturally, youth and elders seem to be on par with each other. You don’t see Wesley Crusher listening to some shock band or sporting an article of clothing that’s cut risqué or uses flashy colors or patterns. Even the language of kids in sci-fi programs isn’t that much different than the adults – something you never see in real life. Yeah, a lot of programs have the characters using new slang terms for their society (Battlestar “frakking” Galactica and Joss Whedon’s “Chinese language without Chinese people” Firefly again), but again, it’s like the younger characters picked up the phrases from the older ones. (“Mommy! Listen to the new words Daddy taught me when he got back from fighting the Borg!”) It seems that after kids have mastered language, they suddenly revert back to speaking in glossolalia – I remember telling my parents what “ROFL” stood for. Why don’t we see this happening in science fiction more? Where are scenes of a Captain Picard trying to indoctrinate a new slang term into his speech only have him look even more out of touch with youth culture than he already is?
Conversely – check this out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8D93Awa434 .
Now that I’ve got your attention, that particular clip has only been taken out of circulation in the last 15 years. From the end of the 19th Century to the dawn of the Civil Rights movement, the average American always assumed that White people were not only superior in every way, but that non-White people had an obligation to become more like us. (This is why films from that era never had blacks in leading roles – and had Caucasians playing Chinese.)
Hell, the role of women in society has been changed dramatically in the last fifty years. Goldfinger is considered to be the quintessential James Bond film, and yet it several scenes that surpass typical 1960’s male chauvinism and propel it entirely into the land of full-blown misogyny. (Case in point: Bond seduces the movie’s femme fatale by forcing himself on her. Try that in modern cinema.) Since the 1970’s, women have broken out of the centuries-old roles of breeders and nurtures and proven themselves to be just as productive and capable as their male counterparts. (Need proof? Look up “women’s MMA” in Google.)
Again, most speculative fiction doesn’t go into the embarrassing actions of human past. When it comes to issues of bigotry, usually it’s the humans wagging their moralistic fingers at another alien race. Where’s the guy who has the uncle that pines for the days when it was okay to discriminate against gay people? Where’s the sci-fi equivalent of the “the South will rise again”? (Don’t even mention Firefly. Their slaves were people, not a specific group of people enslaved because of the color of their skin.) What about the guy who keeps referring to Vulcans as “slant-ears”?
2 – Mother Nature Always Plays the Biggest Trump Card
Okay, so we’ve covered technology and we’ve gone over culture, which is all well and good but ignores the biggest contributing factor to human culture of them all – our environment. We kinda take it for granted that the sun rises and sets, the moon changes phases, and the weather stays within a specific spectrum depending on the season, so those things can seem easy to dismiss. But what if something changed them for some reason?
Anthropology teaches us that the primary factor in any cultures survivability is its access to the basic resources necessary to survive – food, water, shelter. Now in many instances, what keeps a particular culture thriving in an environment where one of those fundamental resources is scarce is its ability to innovate a solution that utilizes that resource to its fullest. This is how tribal cultures can perpetuate in extreme climates like arctic temperatures or Saharan wastes. But for every one civilization that has managed to adapt to the extremities of their environment, there have been dozens that were wiped from existence because of not only its inability to do so, but in many cases they were raped by mother nature.
Mother Earth may be a complex, subtly-balanced life system of interconnected ecological spheres – but she’s also as fickle, complaining, and violently random as schizophrenic woman in the last trimester of pregnancy. History has thousands of examples of how entire societies have been wiped clean off the map because of natural disaster. Mt. Vesuvius erupts and wipes Pompeii clean off the map – nothing human inspired about that. In the late 19th Century, extreme weather conditions created conditions that were conducive to potato blight in Ireland – killing off whole crops, which most of the population was dependent on for food.
And face it, the number one reason why natural disaster, disease and famine occur is because it can. Now, in the case of disease and famine, there is some of a human factor – poor sanitation, over-farming, poverty conditions, overpopulation, etc. – but, in spite of what the tinfoil hatters might say, there has never been a human engineered plague or famine: humans have merely been an effective catalyst for a particular malady to propagate.
As human beings, we have only a vague idea what causes volcanic and tectonic activity, but we no idea on how to predict those events. Furthermore, there are a handful of places on Earth that are only held together with spit and bailing wire.
For example: Yellowstone National Park sits on top of the Yellowstone Caldera, which is why it’s a hotspot for volcanic activity (like the Old Faithful geyser.) The caldera is also 1500 square miles in size and covered by a section of the earth’s crust that is unusually thin. Volcanologists keep tossing about the term “supervolcano” in relation to the Caldera, but assure the public that in spite of the ever increasing pressure they have been detecting, there is no threat of it erupting in the foreseeable future. (They also add that there really is no way to detect a volcanic eruption to begin with, so take that as you may.) The last time the Yellowstone Caldera erupted, it was about 640,000 years ago and ejected about 1000 cubic kilometers of debris into the area.
Now take the above scenario and put people into it.
Even if you rule out the possibility of the Earth falling apart like a Yugo that’s hit 1000 miles, you can look to the stars for things to be paranoid of. Meteors aside, there are stars of the exact composition and size of our sun that have solar flares that extend past the orbit of the Earth. Better still, there is a slight, but non-zero chance that the Sun could just say “fuck it” to its process of hydrogen fusion and try collapsing in on itself anyway.
Hope you sleep well after that.
One thing that science fiction ignores, yet would be perfectly plausible, is natural disasters. You rarely hear about simple earthquakes or volcanoes anymore, even in reference to the past. Same thing goes with disease – when was the last super-flu outbreak in the Federation? Or a swarm of insects that decimated the crops on a farming colony?
1 – The Further You Look Into the Future, the Cloudier it Becomes
And finally, the point arrives. If you ever need a good laugh, go to the library and check out a book on Futurology, preferably one that was printed at least a decade ago. Face it, we miss the mark on all levels when it comes to predicting the future.
Think about it this way: you may have a pretty good idea of what you’re going to do tomorrow – most people’s days progress the same way: they wake up, prepare for work/school, go to work/school, do work/school, return home, engage in some form of self-entertainment/household maintenance/socialization, and go to sleep. But what happens if the magnetic wave from a solar flare disrupts all electronic devices in your area, making you late to wake up (no clock alarm), unable to prepare properly for work/school (no appliances), let alone your commute to work and how you go about the rest of your day. And that’s just tomorrow.
How about this: think about where you were on this exact day, a year ago. Wound up in a different place than you thought, huh? And that’s just a year. Try it with five years. Try ten. The further you try to predict between where you are today, and where you’re gonna be in the future, the less you can make out.
It’s like this: the greater the span of time, the more likely my previous four points have a chance to play around. You may think you have a grip on what the next five years are going to hold, but think about your life pre-9/11 in comparison to it nowadays.
So the next time you hear some scabrous net-geek snidely deriding your favorite series because of how “historically inaccurate” it appears nowadays, feel free to sack-tap him. And then after that sack-tap him again and cite your favorite point from the above list as reason why his opinion is worth less than a foreskin full of dog snot. And then tie him to a chair and make him watch you have sex with his mom.
Nuclear Pegacorn 