2099

I never expected to live this long but thanks to a diet of banana peels and genetically engineered ostrich burgers here I am an over-ripe 166 years old. I should also give credit to my daily dish of aphids and silver fish washed down with Schultz’s plant food. Just last week I picked up a new bionic liver and esophagus at Costco. Of course I had to buy two of each and fortunately sold the extra ones on Irving’s List which bought out Craig back in 2037.

As I look back on the century changes in the world order seem both unexpected and yet inevitable. Remember all that fuss over Guantanamo? avana Havana Cuba disappeared in the rising Atlantic along with other Caribbean islands. Major league baseball was devastated but Dominicans managed to resettle in what used to be Miami and the Bronx. Canada has flowered from global warming moving it to number one position in spite of having nearly fracked itself to death. The arctic passage has long since made the Panama Canal a favorite only of cruise ships. The Chinese-built Nicaragua Canal is now the waterway for the Southern Hemisphere. Malibu, the sunken city, became a tourist destination for scuba divers looking for underwater movie star loot.

Circa 2020 Red States seceded from the Union much to the jubilation of Blue States. They soon became the dumbest country in the world with the highest rate of infant mortality, illiteracy, shootings, revisionist history books and drum majorettes. A move to relocate them to Mars where there is no science, no healthcare and no government never got off the ground. Occasionally Red Staters slip up across the Mason-Dixon Line longing for Yankee pot roast and Maine lobster while others head south to Mexico as illegals for jobs as stoop-laborers picking the avocado crop.

Ever since bullets and guns were declared weapons of mass destruction and the NRA designated as a subversive organization prisons have been converted to monastic cells where female and male priests raise hell and their wee ones. Since the Ottoman Empire was restored relative peace has prevailed in the Middle East. Sunnis and Shiites rediscovered their common denominator and even extended their kinship to Israel as fellow Semites.

As for technology I’ve managed to preserve my ignorance of all things wireless, digital or algorithmic. The only advance which has caught my attention is the communication device implanted at birth in the fingers of newborns. 

What we used to call a telephone is now embedded in pinkie and thumb to record every gurgle and whimper, gasp of amazement, proclamation of love, bewilderment, gurgle and whimper again and possibly a final koan as loud as one hand clapping. I’m happy to report the eternal verities survived another century though in nearly unrecognizable dress. Consciousness comes but hard earned.

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