T-16

The Federal Reserve today…I don’t give a fuck what the Federal Reserve did. It was important to people whose actions dictate the long-term horizons of my life, but fuck it. I used to believe in infinite horizons. I used to believe that solutions for cancer and global warming were right around the corner, that the bottomless wellspring of human ingenuity would rescue us from the bottomless morass of human venality. That hasn’t turned out to be so. When I was a child, I was assured that cancer would be cured by now. Lies. I was assured that there would be suborbital transportation that would move me from New York to Ulan Bator in five or six hours, should I choose Ulan Bator as a destination. Lies. I was assured that vanishing oil supplies would spur innovations in transportation and energy that would mitigate the effects of climate changes. The jury’s still out on that one, but I don’t think hydrogen cars and more wind farms are going to do the trick when the Chinese are still burning coal like they all live in 1920s Pittsburgh. In short, my auditors, we live in an age of disappointment, and the only reason we don’t know this is that we’re all too busy fucking Marie Antoinette on the fifty-yard line of Soldier Field while Kurt Cobain and Jimi Hendrix play Bolero in an arrangement for two left-handed guitars. In the VR. Someone suckered us, somewhere along the way. The future we bought into was great until we lived long enough to discover that at some point, the future becomes the present, and the fact that it was once the future doesn’t mean that it won’t be all fucked up once it arrives.