I am a traveler lost in time and space. I’ve arrived in a strange and beautiful land. It is the future here in 2552, but so much is still in the past. Sleek Skytrains are being extended out to the horizon of the ever expanding Blade Runner Capital City and satellites are beaming signals to every home. All cell phones are unlocked and free to roam. The military is now in control. There are still Starbucks and yes, blogs. But so much is different. Will I ever find a way back to my beloved drive-thru’s of Oppositeland in the year 2009, ….or will I remain here forever?
A Thai-Chinese calendar
“…And you may find yourself in another part of the world…”
A message to the people of 2551:
Yes, you laugh at my funny customs, people of the 2550s, but it is not my fault that I was born a barbarian from Oppositeland. I do not drive on the left side of the road as you do here in 2551 – in fact I do not walk on the left side of the walkway, so please excuse me for bumping into you again. “Mai pen Rai,” you say. “No problamemo,” I say. You must understand that I am disabled, because my left hand has never operated a stick shift and my right wants to sip coffee or eat a cheeseburger instead of steer.
I do not know this so-called “metric system.” I no longer know how tall I am, or what I weigh, or my waist size. Nothing fits. I do not know who I am anymore. I cannot ask for the time after 12:59 p.m. because then it will then be 13 p.m. and that makes no sense to me. I do not eat rice and fish for breakfast or some other combination of food that is not pop-tarts or cereal. I do not share my large portion of Applebees Chicken Salad with you unless you are my girlfriend. I do not call the kicking-ball game “Football” and do not understand why it is so exciting to watch.
Look: I am eating food with only my fork and it is in the wrong hand – but that is how I was trained at barbarian school. Notice how I raise my hand to hail a taxi instead of lowering it? I did not know that my gesture offends you, but now that I do know, I will continue to do it because I am a barbarian from Oppositeland. I never thought much about what my feet were doing before I came here; now I think about it all the time. Yes I will remove my shoes and yes I will take a shower – even though it is the third shower I took today. I am a dirty, crude barbarian from 2008 – I can never be clean.
My country, Oppositeland, is very different from yours – it is not being controlled by the military; my country is is being controlled by military contractors – there is a difference. But more important than having good democracy is having good drive-thru’s and in Oppositeland we have the best drive-thru’ s in the world. You would force us to go inside and sit down, to eat in public and to share. Don’t you know this is a form of torture to the Barbarian who only wishes to live peacefully, in his S.U.V., with his In-and-Out Burger and frys and the A.C. full blast?
What is a drive-thru, you ask? It is a concept I cannot explain in your language or mine, except that it is how we barbarians eat.
And what do we Barbarians know of you? We know that you have beaches and prostitutes. It is like our knowledge of France – that it has wine and is obnoxious – what we know of you can fill a bumper sticker. But what we also know is that there are places we choose to invade by force and places we choose to invade with credit cards – for you we choose the latter.
People of the 2550s: I surrender to your kindness and sincerity – but I am from 2008 and I’m afraid I will always need to return to the past – to its drive-thru’s and baseball games and Fox News and sarcasm and all the other crap I didn’t care about back then but do now that I’m away, trapped here in 2551. Are there Jon Stewart’s and Conan O’briens here? Where can I get my ironic detachment – it is an essential nutrient of the Barbarian. And tell me more about this book that I’ve managed to translate only the title so far: “To Serve Man” – what does it mean?
Oh, did that clever, pop barbarian T.V. culture reference from the early 1960’s go right over your head? It was supposed too. There is so much you will never know about us Barbarians and yet because so much of it is so completely stupid, people of 2551, you will not miss it.
