There really is one sense in which we’re living in an L. Neil Smith utopia. I was all by myself, having hiked to J&H’s to find them not home because they went to town to buy hay. No problem, I knew what to do and was industriously doing it when my phone rang. And I enjoy writing that phrase because it still occasionally seems incongruous enough to be funny. When that only happened routinely on Star Trek episodes, it wasn’t especially believable. But there I was, ol’ Cedar Rat Joel, so broke I’ve no idea how I’ll get Landlady’s Jeep fixed, ten miles from the nearest land line, up to my knees in horse shit and ordering a Subway on my Captain Kirk communicator – which I bought for twenty one bucks from a bubble pack at a crappy dollar store. That’s some seriously cool capitalism right there, yo.
And just to compound the incongruity, I used the same gadget to take a picture of the scenery I was seeing at the time. Kirk’s gadget couldn’t do that. 🙂
It is what I tell the youngsters at work… We are living the science fiction of my youth. :^)
You live in a beautiful place for sure. And it is very very funny. Life as a Cedar Rat is a lot more high tech and civilized than it was in the days of Ross Maxwell.
And if you’re wearing an earpiece with a voice activated phone, you don’t hafta pull it out of your pocket and flip it open ala Kirk or even slap the little gizmo on your shirt front like Picard. Now, where’s my gigawatt hand phaser? Sidenote: their uniforms had no pockets. Must be why nobody smoked.