The other day I was drinking a smoothie in the future and it dawned on me: The future is boring! Yes, it’s true. Even 2020, a year punctuated by a Tupac-esque post-mortem Barbara Walters techno song, is boring. Catchy, but boring. "And this is 2020!" Robot that song is good. Even the locust attacks of 2071– boring. Funny, but boring. So I decided to come back to the present and check out a place where modern humanity and culture can be most easily defined in our one-stop shopping times: A bookstore.
Bestsellers galore! I ventured into a local Borders Books and Music where I found a frightening selection of horrible human scribbling everywhere I looked. Upon entering I was bombarded with three things: A crowd of envious humans screaming “Look it’s QX7, oh my god, he’s so huge and shiny,” a litany of homeless people pretending to be able to read in exchange for warmth and shelter, and signs for the apparent best-sellers, which were: Mitch Albom’s new book about dead and dying people, Tom Wolfe’s newest 850 page clap trap, and of course the indomitable DaVinci Code. Mitch Albom is a washed up sports writer now focusing on tragedy and things like “Heaven” to sell books, and it’s working. Tom Wolfe is a shiny suit wearing non-fiction writer posing as a novelist, and the recent winner of the British prize for bad sex in fiction for passages like this:
Tom didn’t show up to receive the award, and is the first person in the history of the competition to do so. Afterwards, like an eight-year-old Italian schoolgirl eating pizza from the crust end, Tom told reporters he intended to write that way, he did it on purpose.
Things only got worse as I kept searching…
