It's over, I'm afraid. I'll be here if you need me.
Not that it matters, but Hate The Future began about four years ago, when I was fresh out of college, in a boring job, and having the generic existential crisis. Since then, I've gotten married, written for some magazines, made a few friends, survived a car accident, taken vacations, gone to concerts, seen doctors, voted, published a novel, sat through sibling graduations, thrown up, acquired a second dog, moved twice, fucked in the afternoon, watched movies, slept through alarms, kept secrets, celebrated birthdays, revised, regretted, relived, repeated myself.
I still have the boring job and existential crisis, but they seem no longer to call for work like this, if indeed it was work. It may simply have been the kind of procrastination that has the flavor of work. A stretching of neurons, that they might not atrophy under the feeble fluorescence of a boring job. I set limits just to disobey them. I told myself a thousand posts would be the endpoint and cruised right past that goalpost, too. Even now I can't wrap things up. There should be no idiotic farewell, I'm sure of that, and here I'll finish tapping it out.
Inspiration, as we know, doesn't last. I might have quit two years ago if not for laziness, inertia, the comforts of routine and the very warm following that unexpectedly cropped up. You've been very kind, all of you, especially on the frequent occasions when I wasn't funny at all. To the countless photographers and artists whose work I unapologetically stole, my thanks. I believe I've confused, misinformed and offended as many people as I've made laugh, and it's on that balance alone I am willing to claim success. Not that provocation was the objective. But I'm no comedian, either. I don't know, maybe you can tell me—why the hell were you reading this?
The illustration above comes from Bruce McCall's Zany Afternoons, my favorite book as a kid. I grew to adore all the usual science fiction, but McCall has a singular vision that will always stick with me—a blending of the now and the soon and the recent past—a dreamy nostalgia for disasters that hadn't happened yet, like time was a pure contradiction, expanding in every direction. Our moment is one human's fantasy, another's history. The present, they say, lasts about three seconds.
I don't think I'll ever be able to stand it.
