Picturing myself in the future:  Far in the future… living in a colony underground.  Trash mountains browning and fuming under the ultraviolet vault.  Sharpened shrapnel breezes carry our strontium sneezes, we can’t ever seem to shake our shudders passing them on through our communicable udders.

Working the hive as a drone.  Sit still in that sodden chair on the wiry hair growing out your ears.  An accountant… which is what I am now.  I’ve never really called myself that.  But, for all intense and porpoises, I am just that.  A bean counter… counting all them beans.

I call myself Drippy.

In this prepackaged and discarded future, we can’t ever go back outside.  Not really.  It’s too dangerous.  The weather… the weather wants to kill us.  Walls of lightening electrify the cluttered miles between stations.  Static fries exposed bodies in flashes and snaps; it only takes a split second.  That’s why we live underground.  The air has to be sent through a bus-sized community lung before it’s safe to breathe and then it’s pumped into our units, mixed with the right amount of laughing gas, i.e., joie de vivre, to keep us in our places and content.  That coupled with “the feeder” and we can just dissipate into ourselves with its help: its gleaming cylinder emits frequencies stimulating the amygdala, the pituitary gland, and the nucleus accumbens, resulting in a very enjoyable experience.  Yowzer!  The problem comes when you have to turn the feeder off and get other things done, because when you “feed” you are in a space between deep sleep and orgasm held at a constant.  It will be better than TV or porn ever was.  Television and flicks will have been all but forgotten like the archaic, garbage they are.  Once THE POWERS THAT BE figure a little more of the brain out, they’re going to be playing chess with us for real.