It's 9AM.

Is old the new "new?"

It’s not that much, I said.

We were driving around Dallas.

I hated it.

Texas Drivers are just as bad as Arkansas drivers.

No blinkers.

Going 90 in a school zone.

Tailgating.

And not the pre-game fun type.

The field was in Frisco and we drove through Plano to get there.

A new Tollway.

New neighborhoods.

Strip malls and shopping centers.

But other than that, it was the same.

Which made me think about progress on the five hour drive home.

What’s different today?

Attitude, sure.

But if you take away your smart phone, and take away your flat screen and new houses, what’s different?

Besides sending kids to play outside.

Someone told me the difference in technology from 1952 to 1973 is almost 100  fold increase in technology.

The intro of the nuclear age.

But from ‘73 to 2023, we’ve only really advanced computer and fashion.

Communication and the methods for communication.

The number of innovations has fallen off by a significant percentage.

His job, he said, was to figure out why.

I said Nazis and he thought I was kidding.

Except…

Right after wwII, the US imported a lot of Nazi scientists.

We needed what they knew to build rockets to go to space and rockets to the moon and rockets with nukes on the tips.

We needed them to build the nukes.

Because prior to 1940, the US was mostly a cobbled together nation of immigrants with special interest groups vying for power.

Not unlike a lot of Eastern European countries today.

We imported Nazi’s after the war and they advanced our tech.

When the cold war started, we focused on that.

Not flying cars.

Not alternative methods of energy.

Not nuclear reactors in each city the size of an electrical substation, powering us for the next three hundred years.

He pondered it and said he would have to think about it.

And asked if I was a fan of the Nazis.

I’m not.

I told him so.

But it gave me time to wonder about what we define as an advance.

I live in a city where people from Dallas brought money and bought land and made it look like Dallas.

Which looks like Atlanta.

Which looks like Orlando.

Only the weather and the names of the stores change.

Strip malls and cheaply built overpriced houses in pocket neighborhoods behind fences and gates.

People celebrate in the streets when you open an Olive Garden but never go to a mom and pop Italian café on Main Street.

Is it just tech that hasn’t advanced much?

I thought about the phone in my pocket.

The knowledge of the world at my fingertips.

Curated and hidden by Google to only show me links it deems safe or woke or whatever the feudal tech lords think is right.

It made me mad at me.

Or disappointed.

Sad that I’m not smart enough to advance the human condition.

Sadder still I’m too invested in giving a damn.

Just unsure how to do it.

Maybe write stories about a better future is one way.

But it’s more fun to write about droid uprisings and zombie wastelands.

More fun to talk about the mysteries of a fictional murder than spend some of my brain trust on why we haven’t advanced as a species to the George Jetson future we were promised.

Dallas looks shiny and new, at least the part we were in North of Plano and close to McKinney.

Maybe shiny and new is enough of an inspiration for the next generation to try and make it better.

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Desolation –

From Past Due – an adventure

It was too early to meet the agent for the key to his aunt’s shop.

His shop, he corrected.

Now it was his.

He drove down main street, staring at the buildings that were ghosts of memories.

Due hadn’t exactly been hopping when he stayed with Aunt Daisy, but he was pretty sure some of the boarded up and abandoned buildings had housed businesses.

Back then.

Twenty years did a lot of damage.

Not just to a town, he thought and gripped the wheel.

His doctor told him this might happen.

Moments when memories would wash up like a tsunami and almost overwhelm him. He tried to imagine surfing that wave of emotion, picturing it in his mind, just as she suggested.

But all he could see and hear and feel were insurgents on every corner, packed with IED’s and shoulder propelled rockets and stolen AK-47’s ready to open fire.

He pulled into a parking space in front of a building and gripped the wheel, trying to breath.

Someone tapped on the window.

“Hey buddy, you okay?”

John turned his head and blinked.

A pretty girl with a mess of curly hair smiled at him through the road grimed glass.

“You’ve been sitting here for thirty minutes,” she said. “I just thought I would check.”

John nodded.

He’d lost time before.

It happened more than he liked.

He must have looked like an idiot just blinking at the pretty girl giving him a curious grin on an almost deserted main street in Due Arizona.

“We’re open,” she said. “If you want to come in.”

She turned without another word and he watched her walk up the sidewalk and through a glass door with words chalked in the window.

Coffee.

Java.

Nectar of the Gods.

All in neon colors, and a free hand script that made it feel free spirited.

It used to be a soda shop, he remembered, with a long marble counter and six big buckets of ice cream in a freezer.

Daisy would walk him down and get them scoops after work some nights.

Dessert in the desert before dinner, she joked.

Crazy Daisy, he thought, and wondered once more why she had left the shop to him.

Sure, he was her only surviving relative, but they hadn’t spoken since just before he shipped off to the war, and that after a little under a decade of not talking.

“Coffee,” he said, though he had a sudden longing for a vanilla cone.

He climbed from the car and followed the woman into the shop.

To be continued