April 03, 2007

The future is now, and I'm pissed about it.

I went to opening day at Safeco yesterday and watched the Mariners win their first (and likely last) game of the season. The stands were packed with 40 thousand some odd fans all swilling beer and cramming hot dogs and peanuts in their faces. My seats were good - 16th row on the first baseline. It was sunny. Sunglasses were on. Laughs were had. All around a great time.

Halfway through the game, the retractable roof went on. In minutes, tens of thousands of people suddenly had a roof over their head. Which really struck me as funny: we've got the technology to put a retractable roof over a stadium in less than 20 minutes, but it still takes my hot water that long to get from the laundry room to my shower -- a whopping 1-story climb.

What the hell? It's 2007 and I'm still waiting for decent non-static-y in-shower radios to come out and spending hours driving 15 minutes across a bridge in rush hour traffic while listening to CDs -- antiquated, skipping, scratched up CDs! (Which, by the way, are the worst-executed invention ever. Why couldn't we put them in
protective cases like the old floppy disks so they wouldn't scratch after three listens? I mean, doesn't that seem like a pretty obvious solution to you?)

Where is the future everybody was talking about in, like 1979? By now weren't we supposed to be zipping around in spacecars wearing tinfoil suits and telepathically communicating? Where's my damn Jetson's wardrobe? And what about the spacefood? And teleporting? I'm SUPER pissed that we're not teleporting yet.

But oh no, instead of investing in stuff we really want, like the technology necessary to use something other than liquid gold to fuel my car, which I drive to work so I can afford to pay money to watch roofs magically appear on top of sports stadiums, we're spending millions of dollars a minute to stomp around the planet in our Army boots policing the rest of the world, who by the way are getting pretty good and sick of our whole elementary school bully posturing thing and are calling us out as the one trick ponies we are.

Can somebody please explain this to me? And if not, I understand, but in that case, can you just please come over to my house with two to three bottles of wine and some Cheese fish crackers so we can at least get drunk and tell bad dirty jokes and play Scrabble and watch Family Feud reruns and pretend everything's totally cool?

...


Thank you.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The money for all that stuff was spent by George Bush on blow, guns, and a cheap hooker named Juicy. I suppose she wouldn't be cheap then... never mind that, it's funnier if you don't reality doesn't infringe on my jokes.

Oh and that's the real American way. That is giving millions of dollars to billionaires

Unknown said...

Speaking of Juicy, I was just at a comedy central 1-hour special taping for a comic, Kyle Cease, (who I happened to go to high school with, in a bizarre twist) who complained in his act about girls who wear Juicy Couture, because, well, they walk around with the word "juicy" on their butt.

And that's just gross.

I think he makes a good point.