the future

i used to envision the blog as a place to record my most brilliant and pertinent thoughts, a non-wetware storage for all the brilliant brain droppings that i could save before they got flushed away into the sewer of my ADD.

lately my blogging has been under assault by the twit-like allure of facebook statuses, which compel me to arrive at witty (or not) self-absorbed one-liners instead of page after page of rambling self-absorbed bloviation (which firefox claims is not a word, but is nonetheless). and, were that not enough, lately the very brilliance itself of my random thoughts has come under question, by, ironically, the very same random thoughts. oh, the pain of thinking i'm not as clever as i am, or at least, if i am, the sad suspicion that that cleverness has netted me not much after all. also, this gorram cold i've got won't go away and is really dragging me down. but that's life, so i can't hold it against, uh, it.

but anyhow: i thought a thought today which i figured was both somewhat clever and somewhat reassuring. it goes a little something like this:

remember the future? remember how it was all bright and happy and you were looking forward to it and couldn't wait until it arrived? and then, remember how suddenly the future turned all grim and stuff and now the future more or less sucks and you're really kind of not looking forward to it all so much anymore?

well, depending on your understanding (or perception) of the nature of time, it's still the same old future. unless your idea of the future was the first three months of 2009, the future is still ahead of us, and it hasn't changed any since when you thought it was super duper, the only thing that's changed is your imagining of it.

and of course, by "you" i mean "me" and all that. the cheery part of this fabulous epiphany is that the grimness of the now-future is just as much an illusion as the golden rainbows of the then-future. unless your future horizon is very, very near, your view of the future is likely very wrong.