The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Yesterday a rocket landed on a platform floating out at sea about the size of my shack. Landed nose up, thrusters down. Buck Rogers to earth, Buck Rogers to earth, come in earth… The future, as we seldom say down here in the savannahs of the South End, is here. Dick Tracy videos on our watches, robots building cars that drive themselves, computers designing the next generation of computers, space stations and satellites orbiting overhead, drones delivering bombs and Amazon packages, probes that have left our solar system and out into the galaxy beyond — this has all happened in half my lifetime.

Me, I’m still burning wood for heat. I know, you’re surprised I’m not hunting mastodons for meat. Maybe in a few years, you know, after they clone a few and re-introduce them into the swamps here. We got cell towers dotting the landscape now even though I don’t own a cellphone. Or a smarty one either. The dumb one I have seems somehow more apropos for my Neanderthal lifestyle. My techno pals say it’s time to move into the 21st Century so they can text message where to meet me for a cold one at the nearest tavern. A woman in a huge black SUV drove across her lane right at me yesterday and at the last moment swerved to avoid killing us both. I could see the phone resting on her steering wheel where a message coming in or going out meant more than suicide by text.

I know if I can live long enough without becoming a traffic statistic, I might not miss some more of this science fiction coming true, but as you can tell I’m kind of a pessimist when it comes to the future I see ahead. I wouldn’t trust a robot for one nano-second, not when they get smarter than us. If there’s life in outer space, I figure we’ll be a food source. The aliens won’t think that Chuck Berry soundtrack we sent them is going to save the human race. Wars aren’t going to get better because we fight them with drones, c’mon, who’s kidding who? The kids growing up today in the digital world aren’t going to care much about the real one. Global warming? We’ll dither until it’s too late. Maybe we’ll adapt. Although … if I’m any role model for that, good luck to the rest of ya.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 14th, 2016 at 2:14 pm and is filed under rantings and ravings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.