What Kind of World

Global Social Lubricant / 2014 / Pasted paper collage / RCS

The future is looking back at us and shaking hands with its former selves. Reaching through time, we imagine a better tomorrow, next month, and several decades from now. With each breath, we’re becoming another version of ourselves. How does our own story impact this rotating planet we live upon? There’s a potent mix of wonderment and despair encircling the globe. Everyone’s asking why and when and how much longer. Each day is a speeding car, rolling down the freeway to oblivion on four flat tires. Scraping and sparking all the way to the end of the line on bent rims and a broken GPS. What kind of world will there be in two hundred years’ time? Multiple elsewheres are alive and well in the pages of time travel novels. Feels as though there’s a pasted-on and much preferred destination calling us onward from our current broken and distorted reality. The broken series of dangerous and deadly events, experiences, and catastrophes are about to be boxed-up and shipped to an underground air-conditioned warehouse twenty miles below the surface. Darkened corridors, and vast vaults where memories become stored away for far-future archaeologists and cultural botanists, from this world, or another. I roll over and wake in the now, daydreaming of future selves in better worlds. While waiting for my tea water to boil, I think about my train rides back and forth across the continent, my starchasing mind, my glasses-cleaning self and window-washing ideas, myself undone and undecided, myself found in the unlikeliest places, myself as far from the city of my birth as I’ve ever been, myself in trailer parks and high-rise penthouses, myself backwards and newly discovered, my previously unknown and subterranean self. Out the door and into the woods. We find ourselves high on air and navigating densely wooded forest trails. Newly imagined lifetimes arise in flowing conversations, and life altering plans are made before daybreak.