There it went, the future in a Reynold's wrap. The delicate, wood grain console future, with its primary-colored lights blinking behind opaque plastic and humming with an internal, transistorized focus: my future, the one rumored with professions of competence, even if it was only competence in weilding the machines that would allow me to keep house. Maybe this seems old-fashioned, the kind of inanity that allowed the SciFi channel to bastardize its acronym in the hopes of a better trademark--we look forward in hope and back in silliness.
Oddly enough, the latest art exhibit at the MFAH (Museum of Fine Arts Houston) focusing on the existing Latin American art collection, seemed redolent of that future. Color and transparent glass, wire work hanging in a graceful suspension of shadow and breeze, and the dream of pods floating above a city, naked to its gaze. Not the silliness (although there was humor), but the best kind of vision where your eye is given over to the artist, to play in a different outlook.
What I remember from the imagined futures of the past is that I didn't expect to be here, online, connected...educated and yet not able to understand the new futures that proliferate daily. The exhibit gave back my expected future and in doing so gave back some of the joy that I had taken in anticipating it. It broke a logjam I hadn't realized inside.
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