Dear FutureMe,
How predictable are you? For RecentPastMe to trolley his way into a lil’ bookstore in Bangkok’s new airport terminal, and glimpse the spine of a book metallically emblazoned with the title Dear Future Me among a bunch of Thai sex tourism novels — maybe not so much.
After extracting the fluke find from its shelf, you discovered that Dear Future Me: hopes, fears, secrets, resolutions was a compendium of anonymously written letters-to-future-selves sifted from www.futureme.org. It seemed like a lazy publishing initiative that preyed on the emotionally voyeuristic, much like the public-blog-to-book PostSecret (today’s Chicken Soup for the Soul). But since your flight to Manila was delayed by two hours and you hadn’t been a smoker (again) for 11 days, you decided to pay for what could have been a bowl of Tom Yum, two bottles of Singha beer, and an issue of Time. Besides, your transitory self appreciated the gratuitous existence of a site people could write notes they could send their electronic mailboxes on any later date they chose. (A short reminder a year from now on how a pap snap of Amy Winehouse made you feel about hygiene, maybe, or a bout of existential rumination dropping in your inbox a week before the day a shtick site like deathclock.com predicts your biting of dust.)
So nestled on the cold metal of an airport bench, you foraged the book for cheap soul junk food — lapping up all the defeatist self-assessments (“Everyone you ever cared about has left you because you’re fat, ugly, and clingy”), random documentation (“This Christmas, I was violently ill after having eaten [brand name] pork”), and perchance optimism (“are you all recovered from the cancer? i bet the scar is sweet as sh*t”) that had been written since futureme.org’s web entry in 2003, displayed publicly in the years since, and are floating in online space-time limbo ‘til their dates for transmission.
Oh, the humanity, you thought, likening the book to a dragged-out Iñárritu film (
Digging through all that self-correspondence made you want to take a cathartic crap, which is what you’re doing now, typing this sort-of letter up while the plane is cruising 37,000 feet above the South China Sea. Plane rides and letters like these are similar in prompting you to contemplate the great beyond: what lies ahead and your own mortality. Like being in-stasis way up in the skies before getting to your destination (not to mention a missing chunk of fuselage possibly dragging that plane down to its doom), this letter also transports, given life and technology permit and it reaches its sender. Right now, however, you don’t know what’s more unsettling — the turbulence or my future/your present.
It’ll only have been a week when PresentMe chose this letter to find you but since you claimed adulthood (at 12), just keeping up with each unpredictable day is next to godliness. And here comes another marker of age, the not-so-big-but-daunting 2-4 days after you receive this. You may have a pretty good idea of who you are at this point — the kind of guy who’d rather eat a cockroach than pet a rat, who can appreciate a positive horoscope reading like he can a bowl of Lucky Me! Spicy Hot Mami, and who may be over figuring out who the antichrist really is simply because there are too many candidates for the position (e.g.: Seacrest, the iPhone, Barack, given your blind admiration for the guy). Turning a year older, however, feels like stepping into a new age of anxiety.
Admit it, taking those five days off to become “travel attaché” to your mother in Bangkok — “helping” her navigate both Sky Train and Thai menu — and wasting away in your hotel room while she went about her “spiritual transformation” seminar was just another means for escape. A break from the 100 Proof all-nighters that strive to distance you further from those grad school applications. God knows you need to ship your lazy ass to any place where rolling with the higher cost of living will allow you to feel a sense of accomplishment. And while you work hard to make this or that clean getaway, you can’t seem to make up your mind on whether you’re up for a trickle of brief escapes or a sweep of self-sustenance in a city that isn’t a sinkhole of apathy like the one you live in.
But escape — that seems to be the world’s current inclination, isn’t it — a remedy to its neurosis? Or perhaps you’re projecting. While you can afford the Tom Yum, the beers, and Time, there are a lot of things that bother you more than the latest M. Night Shyamalan movie you caught on dibidi. You didn’t care about all the flak it got but you were both drawn to and dismayed by the premise of humans literally offing themselves as a result of treating the world like how Amy Winehouse treats herself. Of course, it wasn’t as troubling as that Austrian dude who knocked his daughter up in their basement or that druggie who blacked out and cannibalized a 14-year-old girl in broad daylight, but let’s face it, FutureMe, all this worrying just supports your prognosis that you and every kid out there’s growing a highly cancerous tumor. And that you’ll maybe even have to write another letter to your future, future self asking about all that chemo.
As you’re reading this, however, you’re probably wishing you could sock me in the face. All the FutureMes I’ve tried to contact have wanted to anyway. Why a letter like this should be written to an as-of-yet-non-existent being is just another excuse, another escape from a shady present via the keystrokes and mouse clicks this generation subsists on. It’s so much easier to be a fatalist nowadays because the future seems so much more bleak and uncertain, prompting us to write yearningly to it with our subliminal demands, reminders, and queries. But do you really need to write a letter to be who you want to be?
Sure, PresentMe can choose to blaze through the week, indulging every distraction and pissing his liquor-laced time away with the flush lever a little blurry from reach. He can look at his columnist gig as a weekly session of electro-shock torture/therapy that only seems to attract tween jihadists set on vindicating a pop rock star they’ll get over in a year or two. He could dismiss life as meaningless, declare the end as nigh, and pronounce the future as absolutely unpredictable in that all those silly letters might not even reach their senders if Suri Cruise becomes antichrist and Armageddon ensues.
He can do all those things and piss you off, FutureMe. But in the end, it really isn’t about you, is it? ‘Cause when the future is as unpredictable as it is, even I might have a chance at salvaging it.
WRITTEN:
SENT: Today
