The Future's So Bright I've Got to Wear Shades

By Rory McClannahan

Time traveling is easy, all you need is a frozen pizza.

Almost no food is as easy to make as a frozen pizza. You take it out of the freezer, take off the plastic wrapper and slide it into the oven preheated to 400 degrees. Twenty minutes later, dinner. And while the pizza isn’t as good as you might buy at a restaurant, it isn’t horrible.

I was guilty of thinking about this last night as I placed a frozen pizza onto the round metal tray and putting it in the oven, remembering the days of my youth when enjoying a pie wasn’t so simple, nor as palatable. I regaled my oldest son about the home pizza process that involved a Chef Boyardee pizza kit and the same pizza pan that was currently in the oven as I spoke.

For those of you under 50, the Chef Boyardee pizza kit was one of the few ways in which you could enjoy pizza at home. The kit itself came in a box that included a can of nasty sauce, a small envelope of parmesan cheese that smelled slightly of vomit, and a larger envelope of powder that, with the addition of water, would become the crust. We never had any exotic toppings like sausage or pepperoni, it always was ground beef.

As I told the kid about my experience of trying to spread out that sticky crust dough onto that metal pizza pan that still lives in my cabinet, I finished with these wise words, “Man, I love living in the future.”

I suppose it is a function of age mixed with nostalgia that makes older folks like me feel like time travelers. I remember how the world used to be and now everything is so different. I think about the time in the early 2000s when I got my 64-year-old father a CD player for his birthday. He was amazed at all this cheap gift could do, especially when it came to skipping over those songs he didn’t like. I was amused by his enthusiasm, as if I was looking at someone who had traveled in time from the mid-1970s to then.

Now I get to experience that feeling myself.

Pizza, and all frozen foods, are just one thing about living in the future that amazes me. I remember frozen TV dinner when I was a kid. A tin tray covered with tin foil heating in the oven for 20 minutes or so. (Make sure to fold back the tin over the desert.) I liked the Salisbury steak okay, but the rest of it kind of sucked, even the blueberry cobbler for desert. Now, you can get frozen meals that are not only edible, but quite tasty.

We won’t go into how these processed foods have made us all a little less healthy, but I find it amazing that I can stick a bag of rice in the microwave and be ready to eat in two minutes. That Uncle Ben is a freakin genius.

When I was a kid in post-war America, there were futurists predicting what our lives would look like after the turn of the 20^th Century. Mostly what we got was a 1960s version of what the world might look like. The common complaint of folks these days is that we don’t have flying cars and jet packs. For the record, I never expected either. One thing about the supposed future that always amused me was the belief that everyone would be wearing the same style and colors of clothes, which seemed to be made with polyester pastels.

However, what has happened over the past 40 years or so with textiles is nothing short of amazing. Using both microfibers and nanotechnology, we can buy cheap cloth that is breathable, water wicking and won’t wrinkle. Not only has this impacted the clothes we wear, but the fabrics on our furniture and our camping equipment, aa well as pretty much everything else. I don’t know about anyone else, but much of the clothes of my youth were made by my mother. Her fabric of choice was usually something polyester, and the styles were whatever patterns were sold at TG&Y. Mom usually didn’t make our jeans, but as the third of three my pants were usually patched and handed down to me from my older brothers.

When I got old enough to get a job, some of the things I bought was clothes and shoes. One thing that had not changed was that teens will judge their peers based on clothing. Homemade polyester shirts, patched highwater jeans, and cheap plastic K-mart shoes were not what the cool kids were wearing.

Another thing I would spend my money on was music. My first “stereo” was a record player of mysterious origins. It was plastic and had a small speaker on the side. It wasn’t long before I had moved up to a Realistic Stereo System purchased from Radio Shack. I also had a portable 8-track player that I would take from the house to listen to my George Carlin tapes.

I also think it should be noted that in order to create a mix tape, you would have to hold a microphone up to a speaker while a song played, an iffy prospect when recording off the radio. The music itself was purchased in the form of cut-rate albums put out by K-tel at the hardware store. (I lived in a small town.)

I don’t know if I even need to go into the enjoyment of media here in the future. I have two MP3 players and numerous devices that will play a CD, DVD, and Blu-Ray. I have Bluetooth soundbars and some plug-in type speakers. I have several sets of ear buds and over ear headphones, each are wonderful in their wound reproduction even though I didn’t pay a large amount of money on them. I don’t stream my music but appreciate that the technology for it exists. I have several television sets that were inexpensive, extremely light, and connect me to more entertainment than I thought could ever exist.

Finally, as a kid if someone would have told me that I would carry a computer in my pocket that not only could make phone calls, but take pictures and play music, I would have thought it was crazy. Yet, here in the future we all have a Little Brother in our pockets in which we can communicate in several ways to just about anyone in the world, and take and send photos of any stupid thing we deem important.

Living in the future is amazing. This, of course, is ignoring all the drawbacks that these wonderful things have brought with them. Not everything is all good. Disposing of new textiles and other plastics is so difficult and pervasive that humans now have plastics in our bodies. Food processing has made us unhealthy. Our obsession with media technology has turned us into zombies feeding on celebrity rumors and fanaticism.

That has made many of us older folks nostalgic for the past, we long to make things great again, forgetting that the past was never that great. Maybe it seemed simpler then, but obviously not ever everyone. If you were a person of color, or a woman, or homosexual, or different in any way, life was not that great. If you got sick, there was a larger chance you would die. If you had a disability, your life was one of institutions.

Yeah, the good old days weren’t really that great. I’m happy to be living in the future, if only because microwave popcorn is delicious.