Progressive Thoughts - Day 12

Today’s song is another by Rush. This is a recent one called Headlong Flight, which basically talks about how being happy about your life despite the ups and downs that you have had to endure.

As you can expect, in 54 years of living on this weird planet, there have been quite a few ups and downs, a lot of which I’ve bored readers with in the (almost) nine years I’ve been writing crap for the world to read.

In the grand scheme of things, however, my contribution to the history of this planet (or more accurately, the history of humanity on this planet) is in fact so tiny that it is negligible. In two hundred years’ time, my contribution to history will probably only be a footnote in the hobby of a descendant researching their family history. That assumes that I am lucky enough to have descendants at that time. I have two boys at the moment and I would like to hope that they will both produce clones who will also produce clones (etc. etc. etc.).

What will they discover?

With any luck, they will find an ancient blog out there on whatever the internet evolves into and hopefully they will regard my wittering as something they can appreciate, despite all of its flaws.

As I get older, I find myself looking backwards to the past more and more often. There are constant reminders, such as music, television programmes and people dying (as morbid as that sounds) that remind me of times gone by and I am beginning to feel an urge to scribble it all down in a medium other than an amateur blog.

That’s why, a couple of years ago, I started scribbling down a kind of autobiography. As usual, procrastination has been victorious and beaten me into submission so I have left it untouched for at least a year. My main reason for starting it was to hand it down to my lads so that they could remember me when the Grim Reaper knocks at my door.

I didn’t do this for selfish reasons. On the contrary, I want them to see what my life was like before they were born first hand rather than looking at history books primarily because I regret not finding out more about my own family history.

My own family may seem unremarkable in the grand scheme of things but when you dig down there are some nuggets of interest.

My grandmother’s brother, for example, was killed in World War I and my grandad was a prisoner of war in World War II.

These stories are gold and I hate the fact that, as a child, I didn’t interrogate my grandad about his experiences in those tragic times.  I can’t change that now because, sadly, there is nobody around to inform me.

My own life is far less exciting, as readers will agree. Nevertheless, there are some nuggets even in my life that may be of interest to future generations. For that reason, I aim to complete my stupid little autobiography and possibly even to delve into my own family history and write something about that.

Who knows what I may uncover?

I may even find an old book written by an ancient ancestor of mine full of rants about how unfair life was back then.

Now wouldn’t that be interesting.

Progressive Thoughts - Day 4

I love the title of today’s song but I must confess to not really understanding it. The song is by one of my most recent and favourite discoveries, a progressive rock band from Poland called Riverside, who have totally won me over in the past two years.

The song is called Lost (Why Should I Be Frightened by a Hat?).

To some people this sums up how strange progressive rock can be with weird song titles and bizarre concepts as subjects. Yet, despite the odd title, this is a beautiful song and typical of the band.

The meaning of the song is, thankfully, not weird at all. Basically, it is about somebody looking back at his younger self and picturing the innocent wonder as the boy contemplates his future life with no fear – only excitement.

I can relate to that.

I cannot remember the thoughts going through my mind as an innocent boy. Some of my friends may ask “Were you ever innocent, Dave?”, to which my answer would be “Of course!”

But as a young child, I cannot confess to ever being unafraid of the future. To be honest, I was captivated by it but also deeply scared because it was all about the unknown. My fascination with science fiction steered my imagination into a vision of the future that was as terrifying as it was amazing.

Back in 1970, most kids were looking at the year 2000 with awe. I used to love reading books and watching TV programmes about what life would be like in that amazing future. To be honest, some of it has come to pass, but equally, one or two ideas from that time are laughable.

For example, we all thought that there would be a Moonbase, like in the TV series Space 1999 and UFO, and that we would be travelling to the outer reaches of our solar system. Also, the vision of orbiting space stations crammed full of people seemed to be a distinct possibility.

Closer to home, we pictured ourselves sitting in futuristic houses, with robots as servants , We would travel around in flying cars and be able to travel to the other side of the world in aircraft that left Earth’s orbit and could, say, fly from London to Sydney in just two or three hours. Furthermore, seers predicted that we would barely have to lift a finger in our own homes, from asking the cooker to prepare dinner and switching things on and off with voice command.

Now these later items do seem possible. Certain people got it totally right, particularly with the prediction that we would be carrying or own computers with us (in the shape of a smartphone) to being able to summon our own entertainment by watching television on-demand from a vast library of movies, TV series and box sets.

I am fascinated by the future and I would love one of two things to happen. Either I somehow become immortal and can watch the development of future technology over the next few hundred years, or somebody invents a time machine that can whisk me away to the future where I can see for myself what happens.

That would be a dream if it were possible.

Of course, depending on your religion, there might be some hope that when I finally shuffle off this mortal coil, I may be born again and enjoy the future that way. Sadly I won’t be able to remember this life – unless technology permits it, of course.

Who knows?

I remain optimistic.