Cassidy Steele Dale forecasts and contextualizes the present to equip us to make a better, kinder future…
… and one of those ways to give you some things to keep in your pockets for this weekend. Or for later.
It’s regrouping week here at Think Future’s Central Headquarters (the corner of my sofa nearest the lamp — not that one, the other one, no, the other one) and since we’re now rolling into Labor Day and nobody wants to fuel any arguments with family or friends at the barbecue…
I give you some easy things for your immediate future — meaning, like, today through maybe Labor Day evening after everyone’s gone home. Plus some on what’s coming up in this newsletter. With a stinger at the end in case you need one.
So.
In case you need a window into my life with my friends:
A few weeks ago we were at a friends’ house for a cookout — and an opportunity for all our kids to go feral. After the kids had screamed/Dopplered off around the corner of the house all four of us collapsed back into our lawn chairs and pulled out our phones for a moment of quiet. After three long minutes, the husband said “Flash-bangs are back in stock” and, without looking up, the wife said “Two.”
In case you need a window into the progression of the Trump campaign this year — or at least what it’s looked like from the inside:
In case you need a window into my office life:
One set of bathrooms finally reopened after 119 years of renovation and I thought they were being straaaaaaangely underutilized until someone said “Nope. Nobody wants to beta-test a shitter.”
In case you need to see what the Muppets are like at a karaoke bar:
In case you need to know what old-school Germans sound like when playing techno… with their beer and pretzels:
In case you need to go further back and hear the Orkestra Obsolete play New Order’s “Blue Monday” on 1930s-era instruments — including a theremin:
In case you need to come halfway back up into the present and you need a little ditty from The Hillbilly Moon Explosion, the best-rockabilly-band-from-Switzerland-you-could-ever-ask-for:
And in case you need their peppy little high-octane-foot-to-the-floor-gasoline-leak-with-a-lit-cigarette song about depression:
In case you need to wind down instead, here’s a gorgeous Hawaiian version of Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game”:
In case you need a quick look at what’s coming up in Think Future, in the coming weeks while we’re in danger — and later when we’re out of danger/danger-adjacent — I’ll tell you about:
the best haunted house this year. It has no address on Google Earth and you won’t find it unless I tell you where it is. Or it jumps out and grabs you off of the sidewalk. It will give you hope.
the AM radio station at the top of the world that plays only 78 rpm records. Half its listeners are online and the other half are polar bears who are tuned into the music of the spheres. Oh - and the backup seed bank for the world is within line-of-sight of the radio tower.
the time that-didn’t-happen when Europeans never landed here and the future of North America was instead a Native American Wakanda.
the time that maybe-happened in which H. P. Lovecraft’s Old Gods lay sleeping beneath the mountains of Appalachia until coal mining a century ago slowly woke them up.
a whole thing about pirates in a Caribbean that’s not ours plus some Vikings and samurai — all fighting off the encroachment of the apocalypse.
giraffes, voter fraud (the lack thereof), and the Corgis of the Serengeti.
the time I was laid up in the hospital on morphine. “Be Thou My Vision,” Charlie Chaplin on mute (which was redundant), and Patton Oswalt were there.
the bad, bad fight we might have between the election and the Inauguration that I’m right now trying to figure out how to forecast.
and — if I get the clearance — the fistfight I almost got into with a goat that-I-totally-would-have-lost and why my dog would have been the worst surveillance partner ever. She had no chill.
But two last bits in the meantime:
In case you need some musical geeks being amazing, you know, melodically and in zero gravity. Seriously:
Lastly, in case your favorite faraway city from long ago is changing and you worry that all the goodness that-could-ever-be is being plowed under forever:
But before you get too nostalgic and melancholy or melacholic or melacholonic or whatever-the-word-actually-is and think the past was better…
(1) remember the dentistry
… and before you lose faith and worry the future could never be better…
(2) despite the five miles of really bad road just ahead, it’s about to be.
See you next week.