The future isn't what it used to be (the future is now) 12.28.01

I don't know about you, but here it is 2001, almost 2002, and I still feel like 2000 A.D. is way far in the future.
It's like there are two different 2001s. One is this mundane reality we exist in where the date is just something we put on our checks to make them legitimate.
The other 2001 is the stylized vision of the future we were all counting on for decades, an imaginary landmark always 20 minutes into the future, never quite attainable.
I remember when I was a kid sitting in my sixth grade class talking about the future. There we were on the brink of 1980, a magical number if ever I heard one.
It was the first future-sounding year I was to live in because let's face it, even in 1977, 1978 sounded like old news while every year since 1980 has seemed as new and unusual as Stardate 8917.56. Anything was possible.
Our teacher said a decade change was quite exciting when you were an amateur and the first one is always special. A century change must about knock your socks off, but we were all in line to still be alive for the new millennium, a prospect no one alive at that time could describe.
How old would we be? What would we be doing.
I will be 33 in 2001, I thought. Why, I'll probably be married to a really good-looking woman and have kids almost my age by that time. I will probably be living in my own house with my very own personal 8-track player in my den just like "Brady Bunch," flying back and forth between the moon and mars on business trips with alien cultures.
Thank God I didn't know the truth back then.
Had I known when I was 11 that by the time I was 33 I would be a fat diabetic just out of college for the second time living a loveless existence with no offspring to fulfill my genetic destiny or take care of me in my old age making less than my sixth grade teacher did in 1979, driving a car that DOES NOT fly, watching cooking shows, reading Batman comics, living in fear of terrorism, taking nine pills a day, addicted to nicotine and cheese while looking forward all week long to my Friday night nap, I probably would have thought twice about going to junior high and joined the circus.
I don't even have a dog, man, and I don't want one because I don't think I am ready for that kind of responsibility. It would be funny if I weren't completely serious.
The future was supposed to be a cool groove and some bits are.
Flying cars aside, we do live among some great technological advances. We couldn't conceive of having more than four TV channels when I was a kid, let alone the Internet. Having all the world's information available at your whim is certainly a smile.
I have nearly 600 songs stored as MP3 files on one shiny round disk and I didn't pay for any of them. Nor should I have had to. Air Supply made their money from "All Out of Love" already, they should pay me for giving a damn 30 years after the fact.
We have game systems today that make Atari and "Pong" look like beating rocks together looking for sparks.
Cells phones? Don't even get me started on how cool it is to talk to anyone, any time, any where.
Time was we thought aliens would have to give us the cure for cancer, but today more people survive than we ever thought possible.
Microwave popcorn. No one would have thought THAT was possible in 1979 except for Orville Reddenbocker. The man was a visionary.
It is disappointing that we still live in a world where entire nations go hungry while we shrug it off and the cost of doing business.
It would have been nice to keep the space program moving along for something more than just carting spy satellites into orbit. We should have been to Mars by now instead of just getting started on our first real space station.
In the end, I guess the future we get is only as good as we make it. When I look at where I am, how I got here and where I hope I'm going, the hitches in my get-a-long were as instrumental in my course as everything that supposedly went right.
Take the good and the bad together and hope for the best is about the best we COULD hope for. But a jetpack would totally rule!