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Just lately, we have been watching old Lost in Space reruns, 1967 ?s idea of what 1997 was going to be like. Foil suits and a washing machine that, by pushing a button, washes, dries, folds, and wraps shirts in cellophane, all inside of 20 seconds. In the episode that I watched today, Mother Maureen and teenage daughter Judy are setting their space table for space dinner. Judy peeks under a dish cover and smiles at her mom, ?Cherry pie! Mother, how did you do it? ? Mom beams, ?With a computer! ? Of course, they are stranded on a desert planet with no greenery, except for the occasional vicious man-eating plant. No cherries. 1997 would be simple. Machines working hard for us. Space, travel, laser beams, gyro-stablizers, and force fields that the whole family can use. I nearly choked when eight-year-old son, Will, performing a space-o-nautically complex repair, asked his father for the ?solar wrench. ? Anything natural on this unnatural planet that the Space Family Robinson crashed in upon, all that elemental, chaotic, wildly alive, sometimes hairy and hungry stuff, would be subdued and subjugated by man, Mother, and machine. Simple, perfect, and neatly packaged. Now, a decade past 1997 and I am still cooling my heels on my own planet, waiting for my cosmic protein shake reconstituted from a pill that I will consume dangling upside down from the ceiling wearing my antigravity shoes with the suction cups that I saw in the movie 2001. I ?ll wait patiently. At least we have advanced enough to have our online magazine racing into its seventh year and on into the future ? Periodicals flying through the air on radio waves, then able to be printed on the family ?s personal printer to be read in rocking chairs on Mississippi porches to the tune of cicadas and cell phones. Just like traveling to Alpha Centauri by dematerializing in one of those creepy space tubes. As long as we are part of the material or ethereal future, I ?m content. Editor/Publisher Free Website, Web Hosting
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