dollar bread and flying cars
When I was about ten years old, I grabbed a book off my aunt's shelf in order to relieve the boredom of listening to a bunch of old ladies (they were like, 30!) play Pinochle.
I don't remember the title of the book. It was a musty smelling paperback with yellowed pages and a bent cover. It was a book of predictions.
This was the early 70's. I don't know when the book itself was written, but it had the look and feel of something old.
I laughed when I read some of the predictions.
Bread would be a dollar a loaf! Gas would be over a dollar a gallon!
Ok, I had no idea about economics at that point so, for someone who was given two dollars to run down to the store for bread, cigarettes and milk and still had change leftover for Bazooka gum, these prices seemed like science-fiction.
Yet I gaped in awe at the rest of the predictions.
Man will fly! Cars would have wings! We would live underwater and on the moon! We could travel, Star-Trek like, to other countries in the blink of an eye!
I had no problem believing that man could fly, yet I couldn't get my mind around the idea of paying a dollar for bread.
So I waited. I waited for the underwater cities and the milk that would never go bad and the pills you could take instead of eating. I waited for hovercrafts and machines that would give me superhero powers and beds that would make themselves.
Right after I finished the book of predictions that day, I made my way into my aunt's kitchen where the women were playing cards and regaled them with visions of the future. Their eyes gleamed at the idea of super powered kitchen that would do all the work for you, ovens that baked everything to perfection, robots that would do your laundry. They giggled at the idea of a hologram Elvis entertaining you in your living room.
And they waited. They waited for Rosie the Robot and Elvis the hip-shaking hologram.
So what happened to all these things? Where did the future go? Why doesn't the world look like Cloud City? Why is it that the only predictions to come true from that dog-eared book were the ones we didn't want to come true?
I want my spaceship, damn it. The scientists and speculators promised me there would be spaceships and mental telepathy. I want my x-ray vision and I want to teleport and I want it now, not twenty years from now when sure, I'll probably get a hologram Elvis, but I'll still have to clean my own damn kitchen.