THE FUTURE IS NOW

To the childless among you, here is a grainy, inkjet-on-fax-paper glimpse of your future. Be warned: It's not a pretty sight.

We have seen our future, and it involves robotic, purportedly musical mice, pizza with the same consistency as wallboard, a palpable atmosphere of youthful euphoria mingled with a tangy dash of grownup despair, and lots and lots of screaming.

Oh yeah, and we went to Chuck-E-Cheese's for the first time, too.

IMAGES

It's funny -- the one image that's stuck to my mind on this sad, strange anniversary is one I never actually saw a year ago.

As this (thankfully inaccurate) crawl flashed on the screen, I was stuck in traffic trying to pick Aimee up from daycare, hearing that and a dozen other equally inaccurate bits of information as I flipped from radio station to radio station. And while the long car drive out to Reston and then home to Arlington wasn't exactly panicked, I couldn't help but look skyward every time I stopped in traffic and wonder what might happen next.

Those are the kinds of things that stick to my mind a year later -- the memory of walking out of a hotel meeting room in Tysons Corner and seeing black smoke billowing up from the horizon as the Pentagon burned. Then walking downstairs and passing by the bar, where at least 50 people were standing there frozen, staring dumbstruck at a TV just beyond my line of sight.

One year later, my one capitulation to Grief Porn, as I called the nonstop coverage in an unguarded moment, was to watch AP's live video feed in a tiny window on my computer. It was mostly static shots looking down at Ground Zero, deserted between morning and evening events. As clouds blew overhead on this blustery day, shadows and sunlight floated across the site, creating a haunting elegy for the cloudless day one year before. At one point, I looked out my office window and saw a tree-planting ceremony in front of a building across the street -- a simple ceremony, a small, almost frail-looking sapling. As was the case a year before, those were the things that left me speechless today--my own memories, my own experiences.

JUST GET MY NAME RIGHT

Hard to believe as it may seem, I'm apparently not just a journalist of some reknown, but a valued font of information, a name in the front of the Rolodex for the movers and shakers of the media elite. Especially the media elite of Akron, Ohio. Check out this legitimate news item from the Associated Press.

Of course, not only did he get the name of my publication wrong (it, of course, should have read "Weekly World News"), the reporter also left out a significant portion of the comment he paraphrased. Guess they're just not ready for the Truth in Akron.

PAGING DR. FREUD!

Based on televised portrayals like The Sopranos and the old Bob Newhart show, it's easy to dismiss psychology as an overly simplistic pseduoscience. We forget that its practitioners spend years in school, learning a science based in fact, in medicine, and in the application of theory in clinical settings.

Then we look at something like this, and we want to gouge our eyes out.

COMMANDER-IN-CASH

With the first anniversary of Sept. 11 right around the corner, it's time to reflect, to remember -- and to buy a bunch of commemorative crap.

Usually home to plexiglass Nascar memorabilia and unweildy Celtic swords, Sunday's Parade magazine featured a stunning two-fer of memorabilia on two successive pages. Just in case you didn't find the resin-based commemorative plate of the WTC framed by an array of bursting fireworks (maybe not the best use of visual imagery) to your liking, you could flip the page and see the sad-eyed, officially licensed Hummel figurine proudly hoisting an American flag (perhaps he immigrated in the '50s to work on our missile program).

Then there's this:

"Every American should have one," reads the breathless copy on the Colonial Mint Web site (official motto: "Money not valid in 51 states").

Note that it's a "Revenge Promisory Note." Note, too, that the denomination would have bought you about five shares of Enron stock back in the heady days of.... well, last year. And above all, note that W. isn't our President, nor our Commander in Chief, but just "Commander Bush."

Let the healing begin.