2020

2020. Holy shit. This date really freaks me out. 2020 sounds far into the future. And it is far into the future. Far into the future from where I started my journey in the first half of the 20^th century. Yesterday, while making a deposit at the bank, the teller, a young twenty-something woman, joked “where are the jetpacks?”

Indeed: where are the jetpacks? What we have is a crumbling, underfunded transit system, failing retail, businesses like Macy’s and Penny’s going under, the whole Northgate complex coming down to be replaced by luxury suites for Seattle’s techno-utopian elites. Who – like the rest of the public – buy everything through Amazon, further inflating Jeff Bezos’s gargantuan wealth.

But hey, let me tell you about my colonoscopy: the doctor was a bit late, so I enjoyed a little conversation with the staff. The anesthesiologist asked what I’d be doing if I wasn’t there, about to go under with the sweet lullaby of propofol entering my bloodstream, and I said I’d probably be writing. Which got us all onto the subject of books. The nursing assistant – a young woman in her late twenties – said she loved reading. This was welcome news. I’d been immersed in bleak despair over the loss of readers and growing illiteracy in the world, so hearing this young woman’s enthusiasm for reading hit me with almost as much comfort as the propofol. But what really got my attention was when she said she lived in her parent’s basement, and on weekends they liked reading and discussing books. Here she is doing a complex job and making what must be a pretty satisfactory salary, and her best option for shelter is to reside in her parent’s basement because of Seattle’s outrageously astronomical real estate, and quite probably a heavy load of student debt. And I was also reminded of what a touring rock musician recently told me about all the homeless encampments to be seen along the I-5 corridor. And the tent I saw on the way to the colonoscopy set up in a patch of unappealing ground near Kinnear Park, just a few feet from a constant stream of Seattle traffic, with a baby carriage sitting next to it.

I remember seeing Kubrick’s 2001 in 1968 and thinking well yeah, taking a spaceship to the moon will be routine, a nice vacation for people who really like to get away, play golf on moon dust, float in cruise ships fitted for space travel while sipping mescaline cocktails through a straw as weightless musicians play “Magic Carpet Ride” and “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.”

That didn’t happen, neoliberal economics pulled the plug on NASA and gave us Elon Musk instead, but what we do have are smart phones, social media, & a monopolistic Amazon juggernaut to bring the morning milk, clutched in the robotic claws of shiny quadcopter drones.

What we have is surveillance capitalism, ubiquitous and omniscient as a jealous Protestant God. What we have is an insane clown for president and a vice president who believes the world is 6,000 years old and that humans once rode dinosaurs, just like the Flintstones.

What we have is a corporate dystopia peopled by zombies fixated on handheld computers, seven wars which the so-called left has utterly forgotten about in their obsession with political correctness, 2,208 billionaires, 1.6 billion homeless worldwide and a debt economy based on a psychotic conception of infinite growth.

And my colonoscopy? They found three polyps, a 15^th century warship, a 30 lb. coelacanth and the lost White City of the Monkey God. I can’t wait for the bill.