Freeday 28 July 2000

Pic of the day: It's been a rather hazy week, at least in the mind.

Hazy Freeday thoughts

You'd think that time would just fly, when things just go on in their usual tracks. There has really not been a lot to write home about, this week. Been a little sickish at times, but nothing more than natural for a 41 year old. Fell asleep a few times at work, but only a couple minutes at a time. No quarrel with my friends, since I haven't seen my friends for I don't know how long. Same goes for family. The most exciting thing to happen - apart from waking up gasping for air - has been the computer games. Then again, they are pretty good.

If this all sounds pretty jumbled and chaotic, that's because this is how I feel. Hazy. Scattered. A little happy and a little afraid. Those are my two common feelings, and they're pretty well balanced these days.

***

I've been thinking about how I used to be much happier last year than this year. More childlike, spontaneous and stuff. Then I sat down and read through a random month or so of my archive. Heh. Actually I was much like now, only I wrote a bit shorter. I already reflected on life and death and computer games. OK, I was a bit more likely to use random colors in the text. And bad layout in general. But I guess C.S. Lewis got it right: The human mind is like a wave, sometimes up and sometimes down, attempting some kind of stability but not attaining it. (He mentioned this in the Screwtape Letters, in which a demon supposedly counsels a younger relative on how to manipulate humans or die trying. A really weird piece of philsophical fiction. Then again, really weird pieces of philosophical fiction was C.S. Lewis' hallmark, I'd say.)

I can't cite Lewis as a great literary influence. Then again, I am not a great literary at all, so that may explain it. I haven't even read the whole (or even much) of the Narnia books. I met Lewis through his science fiction book about Mars, or Malacandra as it was called in the book. I loved it. The religious slant was explicit enough to not seem like he was sneaking it in, but it was also a good fiction story in its own right. Today we know too much about Mars, and so the great works of Lewis and Wells and Burroughs sort of fall flat. At least you have to read them for a while until the story takes over and reality fades.

I used to read loads of science fiction when I was younger, but to be honest most of it wasn't all that good. I still think that Asimov was boring. But I am not easily bored, so I read several of his books. It beats work. Anyway, I have no idea why the guy has such a reputation. The Foundation series was interesting, but it was too heavy for my taste. And also there was the ridiculous pseudo science that was the staple of science fiction in the past. Backpack atomic reactors and the like.

***

The truth is, the future is not what it was. And never will be what it is now. Ten years ago, people did not know that the Internet would change our lives. Ditto for biotechnology. In 1989, George Bush in a speech mentioned the Human Gnome Project. Today, most people don't mistake the sum of our genes for some small ugly humanoid of mythology. Ten years from now, unless we blow up the place first, there will probably be some spectacular new things. And some of our current ideas about the future will probably be obsolete.

Nuclear power should save us all, when I was a kid. The cheap energy would make life so much better for us all. Well, life is much better, and energy is generally cheap (or at least we are so rich we can afford lots of it). But nuclear power is still struggling to make a profit, and fusion power remains ten years into the future as it was when I grew up.

The more things change ... Who would have thought that lava lamps would be a hit in the year 2000?