City Nights with Future Sights

My wife and I had the privilege of spending the other day in Seattle. It was a fun day overall. We won some tickets to a in store performance where we got to stand in the "good section" and be the first to "get autographs". It was an okay performance, I am not a huge fan of the music (Angels and Airwaves) but it's good enough to jam out to every once in a while. However, it was cool meeting Tom from Blink 182 afterwords.

Next we walked from lower Queen Anne to the down town area by the West Lake Center. As we were cruising around some of the shops we decided to stop and get some coffee. At this point I remember being really tired and looking forward to sitting down after walking all day. It was a beautiful night, and as I was drinking my coffee I was watching people outside of the window realizing that we are living in the future. 

When I was young I would watch Back to the Future II over and over again. I was obsessed with the idea of the future, I wanted to see all of the cool gadgets, I wanted to see flying cars, and more than anything I really wanted a hoverboard. So maybe we don't have everything we thought we would in the future, but I remember my mother saying she too thought we would have flying cars when she was older. I guess things just take time. But we do have plenty of gadgets. A cook was on his lunch break across from me watching his favorite Television show on his iPod. Somebody outside was getting directions online to where they needed to go off of their cell phone. Then I saw a Mercedes SUV drive by with two TV screens in the back seat for the kids to watch their cartoons.

So this is it. This is the future. I started picturing memories of my childhood and comparing those images with the current images in front of me and trying to decide which one was better. Not that I would rather be a child again, but perhaps it would have been better if my wife and I were at this time in our lives together during those years I was growing up. Do all of these gadgets really make things easier? Or do they separate us all further from each other? These were some of my thoughts as I drank a Tall drip coffee (black) over a pleasant Seattle evening.  

-Cheers