Back To The Future
I watched "The Days of Wine and Roses" the other night as an experiment, which is not necessarily the best way to approach a film but then I didn't have a whole lot to do.
I'd seen it before. It's a good movie, a melodrama from 1962 starring Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick as a married couple who descend into the hell of alcoholism. What it lacks in a sense of realism ("Leaving Las Vegas" or even "When A Man Loves A Woman" cover the subject matter better) it makes up for with nuanced performances from a couple of first-rate actors, sadly no longer with us. And the ending is anything but happy (spoiler alert: Only one of them ends up sober).
Its quality wasn't the reason I watched it, though. I was trying to make a point about technology and the future. I was ostensibly trying to make this point to my wife, who has infinite patience with this sort of thing on my part but tends to lose interest after about 30 seconds. So while she went into another room and watched bull riding, a decidedly low-tech entertainment value (and bizarre, if you ask me, but then she's a Texan), I soloed into the future.
Like most people of my particular chromosomal arrangement, I like technology. If it's new and different (and shiny; that always helps), I want it. And I like to try to spot trends, to see where we're headed and what life will be like down the road, and to wish that I'd thought of it first.
As a kid, I remember reading biographies of Thomas Edison and Samuel Colt, learning how as children they were chronic experimenters, always trying to figure out a better, more efficient way of doing ordinary things, and in Edison's case dreaming up stuff no one had ever thought of before.
I had dreams of becoming an inventor, and I seem to recall (I'll have to check with Mom) spending hours sketching designs for futuristic cars or planes or kitchen appliances. I couldn't draw very well, so unfortunately for posterity some of my best work ended up on an Etch-A-Sketch, which back in those days didn't have a hard drive. So it's hard to tell if I actually came up with an original idea, although I'm fairly certain that, while in college, I invented the taquito.
Anyway. This started with a conversation about NetFlix, which is one of those Internet companies that rent DVDs online and mail them to you. This is one of those ideas I should have had. We'd already seen compact disks supersede vinyl and cassettes in a relatively short time, and it should have been obvious that DVD was the future. How big of a jump is it to see that their small size would make them inexpensive to mail, opening the door to online rentals, feeding that all-American desire to acquire entertainment without having to actually leave the house?
It's not that I have anything against video stores. I've spent a fair amount of time in them, walking the aisles, looking for something interesting to watch, remembering old favorites, losing my kids, etc. The problem is that video stores have a nasty policy about wanting you to return their property, preferably on time, and since this seems overly restrictive to my particular household (it's not just me, although I tend to get the blame) we began to have a line item on our budget for late return fees. Less than food but then, not a whole lot less.
So I've been renting online for a couple of years, and it works well. I keep the movies for as long as I want, then mail them back for free and get new ones. There's no instant gratification here, and I put myself at the mercy of the U.S. mail (never a good idea), but it works for me.
So it got me thinking about the future. We can now watch movies by (shudder) actually going outside to a theater, renting them at our local video store, or doing the NetFlix thing. We can also watch them on pay-per-view, but we're limited as to when to watch and what we can see. Wouldn't it be convenient, and financially worthwhile for the guy who thought of it, if we could order a movie online and have it sent directly to our computers, where we could then shoot it off to the TV and watch without even having to, you know, move?
So this is how I came to be watching Jack Lemmon while my wife enjoyed young cowboys getting bucked off bulls. I hauled my recliner right up to my PC and whisked myself into the future, which unfortunately for my dreams had already been thought of by somebody else.
Maybe someday, though. Maybe someday I'll have an original idea, a new concept that occurs to me first. I'll walk into one of those venture capital places and blow them away. They'll hand over oodles of money and Bill Gates will slap me on the back, and I'll be looked at with more than a little awe for my creativity and foresight.
As long as they don't shake my Etch-A-Sketch.
9:29:11 AM 
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