The Future is Here and Now

in the air Have you ever noticed that the air isnt normal air in an airplane? I mean, I know they have to pump in the air, and pressurize it and all in order to keep us alive up there, but theres just something about the air in the cabin thats different. Its got a smell to it, thats the only way I can describe it. A smell of all these people, going places, running to something, or running away from it. And it always seems that youre stuck sitting next to someone that is either too wide for their seat, or is a businessman with his newspaper stretched out and his lap top computer on his little fold out table. Once, when I was on a flight back from D. C., a flight attendant walked by, stack of magazines in her hand, Time, Newsweek, Businessweek, and I stopped her, asking what magazines she had. And she replied, ñOh, these magazines are for men.î This is a true story. And I asked her again what she had. I had already read Time, so I took Newsweek.

My motherMy motherMy mother We went to see my mother this weekend. You see, my mother has cancer, and we decided to go across the country for a weekend to surprise her and see how she was doing. it was breast cancer, so it really was the best case scenario, i suppose, so i managed to put it out of my mind until we actually had to fly there The night before i couldn’t bring myself to pack. it was two in the morning when i finallly pulled my suitcase out from the pantry shelf. i kept telling people at work, “well, you see, I have to go visit my mother because she has cancer, so I have to miss a few days of work,” but I was always able to say it so matter-of-factly until I had to actually visit her In fact, when my sister told me the diagnosis, it was right around Christmas time, and there was so much work to do and I still had presents to wrap and a meal to prepare and Christmas was supposed to be a happy time that I managed to postpone even thinking about it until we all decided to surprise her for a visit. And then I had to pack. To decide what to take, what to leave behind, put my life into a little black box with a handle and wheels, and go It shouldn’t be this way, and I knew that, I knew that I shouldn’t be visiting my mother under these circumstances and I knew how she never wants to think about bad things because they always make her cry and this would make her want to cry and cry because the only reason why we’re there is because things are bad But I wasn’t supposed to think that way, things would be just fine. So I finished packing at four in the morning and the next thing I remember is I was on the plane with my sisters, cracking jokes as we picked up the rental car. and then we got to mom and dad’s house and everyone was so happy to see each other, it was one big family reunion and we were laughing and talking and trying to figure out where we were all going to sleep and the sisters and dad walked into the front room to see if the couches were good enough to sleep on or if we would have to get out an air mattress and I was alone in the den with mom so I suddenly became serious and sat down next to her and asked her how she was really doing. And that is when she started to cry, saying that the cancer spread, but what she was most concerned with was the fact that she didn’t want to spoil the time that we came to visit her. But what I don’t think she understood was that we could’nt have come at a better time, and nothing she could do would spoil our trip.

coquinas 1 I cant imagine the number of times Ive been there visiting Florida, Christmas with my parents a plastic tree decorated with sand dollars and red ribbons eating Christmas dinner listening to Johnny Mathis and after the Irish coffee, father with his brandy snifter in hand mother and the other girls putting away the dishes the carolers would come, walking in front of our home singing ñWe wish you a merry Christmasî over and over again we would walk outside and the cool breeze almost felt like Christmas after the hot humid days and we would stand on our driveway smile and nod you could see down the road all the candles in paper bags lining the street and for a few lights the bag burned 2 and we would take boat rides off the coast my parents and their friends to a tiny island dad drinking beer sometimes steering the boat control the women sitting together in the shade worrying about their hair i would sit at the front sunglasses, swimsuit and sunburn feeling the wind slapping me in the face and turning my head away from the boat into the wind away from them to face it again docking at a shoreline everyone jumping out little bags in their hands the women go looking for shells the men go barbecue after an hour or two the sandwiches, potato chips eaten the soda and beer almost gone we turn around and head back we have conquered 3 and I remember the coquinas the little shells you could find them alive on the beaches north of the pier in Naples going to the beach I would look for a spot to find them they were all my own they burrowed their way into the sand to avoid the light worming their way away from me I unearthed a group of cocquinas once, fascinated with their color of their shells, the way they moved before they could hide I collected them in a jar, took them home with me what did you teach me what have you taught me to do is this it is this what it has become is this what has become of me of you of us and I took them home I added salt water and sand but I couldnt feed them I realized soon that they would die so I let them

everything was alive and dying I had a dream the other night I walked out of the city to a forest and there were neatly paved bicycle paths and trash cans every fifty feet and trash every ten and then a raccoon came right up to me she had a few little baby raccoons following her, it was so cute, I wish I had my camera and she spoke to me, she said, thank you thank you for not buying furs, I know you humans are pretty smart, you have to be able to figure out a way to keep yourselves warm without killing me and I said, you know they don’t do it for warmth, they do it for fashion, they do it for power. And she said I know. But thank you anyway. Then I walked a little further and there was a stray cat she still had her little neon collar on with a little bell and she walked a few feet, stretched her front paws, oh, she looked so darling and then she walked right up to me and she said thank you and I said for what? And she just looked at me for a moment, her little ears were standing straight up, and then she said, you know, in some countries I’m considered a delicacy. And I said how do you know of these things? And she said when somebody eats one of you word gets around and then she looked up at me again and said, and in some countries the cow is sacred. Wouldn’t they love to see how you humans prepare them for slaughter, how you hang them upside-down and slit their throats so their still beating hearts will drain out all the blood for you and she said isn’t it funny how arbitrary your decision to eat meat is? and I said, don’t put me in that category, I don’t eat meat and she said I know And I walked deeper in to the forest managed to get away from the picnic tables and the outhouses that lined the forest edges the roaring cars gave way to the rustling of tree branches crackling of fallen leaves under my step when the wind tunneled through the wind whistled and sang as it flew past the bark and leaves I walked listened to the crack of dead branches under my feet and I felt a branch against my shoulder I looked up and I could hear the trees speak to me, and they said thank you for letting the endangered animals live here amongst us we do think they’re so pretty and it would be a shame to see them go and thank you for recycling paper because you’re saving us for just a little while longer we’ve been on this planet for so long embedded in the earth we do have souls, you know you can hear it in our songs we cling with our roots we don’t want to let go and I said, but I don’t do much, I don’t do enough and they said we know but we’ll take what we can get and I woke up in a sweat so tell me, Bob Dole so tell me, Newt Gingrich so tell me, Pat Bucannan so tell me, Jesse Helms if you woke up from that dream would you be in a sweat, too? Do you even know why we should save the rain forest? Oh preserve the delicate balance, just tear the whole forest down, what difference does it make? Put in some orange groves so our concentrate orange juice can be a little cheaper did you know that medical researchers have a very, very hard time trying to come up with synthetic cures for diseases on their own? It helps them out a little if they can first find the substance in nature. A tree that appears in the rain forest may be the only one of its species. Or one like it may be two miles away, instead of right next to it. I wonder how many cures we’ve destroyed to plant more orange groves. Serves us right. You know my motives aren’t selfless I know that these things are worthwhile in my life I’d like to find a cure to these diseases before I die of them and I’m not just a vegetarian because I think it’s wrong to kill an animal unless I have to I also know the excess protein pulls the calcium away from my bones and gives me osteoperosis and the excess fat gives me heart attacks and I also know that we could be feeding ten times more people with the same resources used for meat production You know, I know you’re looking at me and calling me an extremist but I’m sitting here, looking around me looking at the destruction caused by family values and thinking the right, moral, non-violent decisions are also those extreme ones everything is linked here we destroy our animals so we can be wasteful and violent we destroy our plants we destroy our earth we’re even destroying our air we wreak havoc on the soil, on the atmosphere we dump our wastes into our lakes we pump aerosol cans and exhaust pipes and you tell me I’m extreme and these animals and forests keep calling out to me the oceans, the wind and I’m beginning to think that we just keep doing it because we don’t know how to stop and deep inside we feel the pain of all that we’ve killed and we try to control it by popping a chemical-filled pain-killer we live through the guilt by taking caffeine, nicotine, morphine and we keep ourselves thin with saccharin and we keep ourselves sane with our alcohol poisoning and when that’s not enough maybe a line of coke maybe shoot ourselves in the head in front of the mirror in the master bedroom or maybe just take some pills walk into the garage, turn on the car and just fall asleep in the wild you have no power over anyone else now that we’re civilized we create our own wild maybe when we have all this power the only choice we have is to destroy ourselves and so we do

communication I now that we have the information superhighway we can throw out into the open our screams our cries for help so much faster than we could before our pleas become computer blips tiny bits of energy travelling through razor thin wires travelling through space to be left for someone to decipher when they find the time II got into work the other day and got my messages out of voice mail: mike trisko left me his pager number and told me to contact him with some information mike wright told me to call him at the office between ten thirty and noon lorelei jones told me to check my email because she sent me a message i had to read so i first returned mike wright’s phone call but he wasn’t in, so i left a message with a coworker and then i dialed the number for mike trisko’s pager listened to a beep, then dialed in my own phone number then i got online, checked my email read a note from ben ohmart, emptied out junk mail realizing i didn’t actually get a hold of anybody i tried to call my friend sheri but i got her answering machine so i said, “hi - it’s me, janet - haven’t talked to you in a while - “ at which point i realized there was nothing left to say - “so, give me a call, we should really get together and talk” III sara and i were late for carol’s wedding rehearsal which was a bad thing, because we were both standing up in the wedding and we were stuck in traffic, and i asked, “sara, you have a cel phone, don’t you?” and she said “yes” and i asked, “well, do you know carol’s cel phone number, cause if you do, we can call her and tell her we’ll be late -” and she said, “no - do you know it?” and i said “no” IV I was out at a bar with Dave, and I was explaining to him why I hadn’t talked to my friend Aaron in a while: “You see, we usually email each other, and when we do, we just hit ‘reply.’ when you get an email from someone, instead of having to start a new letter and type in their email address, you can just hit the ‘reply’ button on the email message, and it will make a letter addressed to the person who wrote you the letter originally. so he sent me a letter once, and it had a question at the end, so i hit ‘reply’ and sent a response, with another question at the end of my letter. so we kept having to answer questions for each other, and we just kept replying to each other, sending a letter with the same title back and forth to each other without ever having to type in the other’s address. well, once i got an email from him and there was no question at the end, and so i didn’t have to send him a response. so i didn’t. and we never thought to start a new email to one another. so we just lost touch.” and then it occurred to me, how difficult it had become to type an extra line of text, to type in his email address, because that’s why i lost touch with him and then it occurred to me, no matter how many different forms of communication we have, we’ll still find a way to lose touch with each other V now that we have the information superhighway we can throw out into the open our screams our cries for help so much faster than we could before but what if we don’t want to communicate or forget how too busy leaving messages, voice mails, emails, pager numbers forgetting to call back what if we forget how to communicate VI i wanted to purchase tickets for a concert but i was shopping with my sister and wasn’t near a ticket outlet but my sister said, “i have a portable phone, you can call them if you’d like” so she gave me the phone, and i looked at all these extra buttons, and she said, “just press the ‘power’ button, but hold it down for at least four seconds, until the panel lights up, then dial the number, but use the area code, because this phone is a 630 area code, then press ‘send’. when you’re done with the call, just press ‘end’, and make sure the light turns off.” so i turned it on, dialed the number, pressed ‘send’, pressed my head against the tiny phone and the line was busy and i couldn’t get through VI i checked my email address book recently, and the people i email the most are the people that live in the same city as me, all of whom i know the phone numbers of, all of whom are only a local call away. in fact, one of my friends lives a block- and-a-half away from me, on the same street as me, but i still email her as much as i call her, even though i could just walk over to her house and have an actual conversation with her. VIII i was suntanning outside on my patio with a friend on saturday, and we decided we wanted to order a pizza. we brought a cordless phone outside with us so we would know if the phone in the house rang, so i picked it up and dialed. and the phone needed to be recharged, the batteries were wearing down, because there was so much static that i was worried the pizza man wouldn’t even be able to hear my voice. while waiting for the pizza man to pick up the phone, i said, mocking static on the line, “hi, i’m calling from the space shuttle, i’d like to order a pizza for delivery. call mission control at houston for a credit card number.” IX i got a program for my computer it’s a phone book program, and it sorts people by name or company, lists their phone number, and has a complete file for them where you can store their birthday, their address, past addresses and phone numbers, faxes, email addresses, there’s room for any information you want to store about them and i love this program, i’ve created a file with all the phone numbers i’ve ever needed, i always add information to this file, i keep a copy of it on my computer at home, on my computer at work, on my laptop, even on a floppy disk, in case there’s a fire at work and my hard drive at home crashes but it always seems that every time i desperately need a phone number i’m nowhere near a computer any computer IX i wanted to get in touch with an old friend of mine from high school, vince, and the last i heard was that he went to marquette university. well, that was five years ago, he could be anywhere. i talked to a friend or two that knew him, but they lost touch with him, too. so i searched on the internet, to see if his name was on a website or if he had an email address. he didn’t. so i figured i probably wouldn’t find him. and all this time, i knew his parents lived in the same house they always did, i could just look up his parent’s phone number in the phone book, and call them, say i’m an old high school friend of vince’s, but i never did. and then i realized why. you see, i could search the internet for hours and no one would know that i was looking for someone. but now, with a single phone call, i’d make it known to his entire family that i wanted to see him enough to call, after all these years. and i didnt want him to know that. so i never called. X now that we have the information superhighway we can throw out into the open our screams our cries for help so much faster than we could before but then the question begs itself: who is there to listen

some people want to believe so we were sitting there at denny’s in some suburb of detroit, i don’t know which suburb it was, but we were there at like ten in the morning eastern standard time, i was grabbing a bite to eat before i crossed the ambassador bridge and travelled into canada. you know, i really only associate places like denny’s with travelling now, i always stop at some place like denny’s only when taking a road trip and just stopping for some food. i think if i went into a denny’s and i wasn’t travelling, i’d get really confused. well, anyway, like i said, we were at denny’s, and it was morning, so the both of us got breakfast. being a vegetarian, i ordered eggs with hash browns and toast, right? and the waitress says to me, like they always do in some no-name town in the middle of america, “yuh don’t want any MEAT?”, like it’s so unheard of to not eat meat at breakfast. so i say, no, no meat, thank you, and then my friend orders pretty much the same thing, and we sit for a while, and talk and stuff, and then the food comes. so then she asks me, “you’re a vegetarian, right?” and i say, yes, and then she goes, “but you’re eating chicken.” and i’m just like, well, no, i’m not, an egg is an animal by-product, not animal flesh, and i was about to say that that was the difference between being a vegetarian and being a vegan, and she says, “but if a chicken sat on it long enough, it would become a chicken.” and i’m just like, well, no, it’s an unfertilized egg, there was never a rooster around that hen, so it could never become a chicken. and she’s like, well, it’s a chicken, though, and she just couldn’t think that this wasn’t a chicken. and i’m just thinking, my god, does she really think that a chicken can lay eggs without them being fertilized? like only worms and stuff can procreate without two sexes present. so our voices start getting a little louder, and then it ends up where i’m saying “so are you having an abortion every time you have a menstrual cycle? are men who have wet dreams mass murderers?” and she’s looking away and saying “i’m not listening to you -” and then i realized that some people, with logic thrown in their face, will still believe what they want to believe.

Copyright Janet Kuypers. All rights reserved. No material may be reprinted without express permission.

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