Nostalgic For The Future

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I'm working on a tech article and interviewing some young technicians. And I'm discovering that they have very little memory but an astonishing anticipation for what's coming. In fact they dwell in a world that has not yet happened...

Where some of us live among our reminiscences – and long to recreate them, these youths know the intensity with which things are racing at us so well that their technological creations almost seem as if they come from some recollection about what's coming.

It's like they are recreating what has never been, from memory – they have a nostalgia for the future.

Which I wanted to picture. And here's how I did it... see... see... see what was once a service station? A place where uniformed people pumped gas, checked oil, washed windshields - all for what? 25 or 30 cents a gallon? It's an artifact - but it's also so bright under a noon-day August sun – so white surrounded now by weeds. It is something that was which is – a specter, or maybe a page mark in our journals. It's so substantial both in shape and color. Yet the vivid thing is under attack by the jungle at its feet and a sky above that's absorbing its hues.

But still it's reflecting what's coming there in the window... see it? See the warm picket fence and the road and that's where newness will arrive - and pass it by.

In its intensity this leftover still screams... "LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME YOU BA#$@$DS! I'M HERE - AND JUST AS REAL AS YOU. AND MORE REAL STILL THAN THE REFLECTIONS OF TOMORROW!"

What differentiates those young technicians from the bulk of people I talk with is not that they fail to see this old gasoline service station, but the fact that while the rest of us take in the blues and the whites and even the spunky cloud that mimics its presence… The techno-kids, what they see is – in the window.