I don't know how this came up the other day in the creative writing group I facilitate, but it did. We were talking about this being the future we all wondered would look like, as we tried to look forward to this. Twenty, thirty, forty years ago.

I mentioned that if I had been catapulted into this future from, say, 1965, I'd probably be surprised at how people dress. I saw 2001, A Space Odyssey back in the 60s. To the best of my recollection Stanley Kubrick didn't envision men my age wearing the ubiquitous baseball caps, faded blue jeans and dirty sneakers 21st century guys are wearing these days. Grown men now dress like the kids on Leave It To Beaver did back in the early 60s.

I was pumping gas this morning ( Another surprise would be what we're paying for a gallon of Exxon ) when seven or eight bicyclists pulled into the lot. They were all wearing the same thing. Helmets, skin tight bright black and yellow pants and shirts. Weird looking shoes. It was like a spacecraft had just landed and its crew had spilled out. They looked like they were from another planet. Or another time. The cyclists looked like what I thought all of us would look like in the year 2007.

Much of the planet looks now just as it did twenty, thirty, forty years ago. That ride north of Route 1 Donna and I took today. The landscape hasn't changed a lick since 1966. It's when you're in a city that you get the feeling that yeah - this IS the future. The architecture. The highways. It's futuristic, like what you saw in the movies and on TV when you were a kid. Which was a very long time ago. A time when boys wore baseball caps, faded blue jeans and dirty sneakers...