ANOTHER YEAR

Well, another holiday season has come and gone, and we’re now in 2008! When I was a kid, I would’ve expected everyone in 2008 to be riding around in jet cars and watching television on their phones (okay, I guess some of it came true). As I get older, I realize how quickly time passes and how things don’t change quite as rapidly as I expected them to when I was younger. In that respect, I’ve come to realize how inaccurate science fiction can be when predicting our future. Just before Christmas, I went to see “Blade Runner – The Final Cut” at our local historic, single-screen theatre. I hadn’t seen the movie since it was in theatres 25 years ago and while I still love the flick, I was struck with how off their vision of the future was, now that we are much closer to the movie’s setting of 2019. People zoom around in hover cars, but they still rely on pay phones rather than having mobile ones. Police carry laser weapons, but people also smoke cigarettes all over the place. Certain changes just can’t be foreseen.

I’m not really sure where I’m going with this except to say that, the older I get, the more I think change is not only inevitable, it’s also capricious. We face so many changes that we never wanted, and we lament the disappearance of things we never wanted to see go away (like historic, single-screen theatres). Some new things do actually grow out of necessity and are welcome (I love the Internet and my iPod), but others happen out of neglect or indifference (I hate George W. Bush and Al-Qaeda). New stuff just keeps happening, while we get up every morning and brush our teeth and eat our breakfasts and carry on with the routines of the day. Life barely moves when you look at it on a day-to-day basis, but when you look back at the trail of time, my how everything has changed!

So now we embark on another year that will fly by too quickly, be filled with all kinds of highs and lows and problems and triumphs, and end with Christmas presents and champagne bottles popping, and we start all over again. All the while, we hope no one gets too ill or dies or has a natural disaster befall them. The goal is to get through the months as best you can and eke out a bit of happiness along the way. Ultimately, I think most of us just want to get through life relatively happy and healthy, and help our families to stay the same way. Meanwhile, we make efforts to provide for the greater good, the creation of a better society, but our arms are frequently too short and our vision too limited. Still, we do try.

So while we roll head long through another year, I’ll continue to babble on about the past – the good, the bad, and the ugly. I’ll show you my new action figure acquisitions and creations, and I’ll probably make up some more photo-plays with my menagerie of vinyl people. I hope you’ll keep visiting, and I hope you check out the other blogs and Web sites listed to the left. Have a great year!