Christmas in 1988 really started the Saturday after Thanksgiving, when I heard Alphaville’s “Forever Young” for the first time while driving to a math tournament. I was a ringer – despite the fact that I was in Trig/PreCalc in 11th grade, I had been entered for the Algebra II competition. I didn’t normally do math, as I had no aptitude for it, and the math team wouldn’t normally have had me, but things were desperate and they were reduced to borrowing from the Scholar’s Bowl team. Which was sort of akin to Billy Graham borrowing from the Hell’s Angels.
Things really kicked into high gear when I got the ring. My class ring arrived the first week of December. White gold, 10K, fake aquamarine, and “1990” – a magical date, a number to conjure with, a deadline with the promise of better days ahead. When I wore it out at night, and the starlight hit it just so, all the hope and potential of an unlimited future was clearly visible at the bottom of that synthetic gemstone.
“Forever Young” and “Photograph” and “Bohemian Rhapsody” were our Christmas carols. I was 16, I had a reasonably viable car, I had my crew, I had a starting spot (alternate captain!) and a trophy to defend, I had a name and a nickname and a callsign and a growing reputation as an over-caffeinated psycho with a vicious wit and some serious social defects, because they hadn’t standardized the diagnosis of Asperger’s back then. And the world was just waiting for me to own it.
To be honest, the future wasn’t all that unlimited. In a lot of ways, it was badly limited by my own lack of imagination (what person, given unlimited power to travel through time and space, would carry out all his adventures within a 40-mile circle?) and there were practical considerations – I really didn’t have a future as Alabama’s quarterback, for instance. I say that because as I look at things now, there may not be as much unlimited future potential as there was twenty years ago – but who’s to say it was so unlimited then? Or that it’s so limited now?
The big difference is that I now live in the future. Don’t believe me? Do the list. Device in my pocket the size of a pack of cigarettes, with a thousand songs and a mobile phone and instant communication with “E Mail” and all the world’s knowledge to hand. Living in Silicon Valley. In California. Six-foot blonde girlfriend wife. NASA in my backyard, futuristic dirigible overhead, honeymoon in Edinburgh and vacation in Paris, listen to radio from London and Washington DC in real time, and – how crazy future-unlimited is this for a kid from rural Alabama? – Black President.
The future really is now. And it’s just waiting to be pwned.
I am in love with this line: “The future really is now. And it’s just waiting to be pwned”. Maybe because I finally feel like I am in a position to do a little pwning of my own. Which takes me back to your last comment on my post that there are far too many “kids like us” needing to be saved, to see that there is a future for them to pwn. Carving out our own futuristic present here on the Dirty Coast may not be as easy with the not having NASA in the backyard, but we are trying our damnedest!