Past, Present and Future

It is a fact of life, that we are driven by our Past, which colours our Present and drives our Future. Whether we like it or not, that’s the way it is. I didn’t make the rules. I’m simply inventing them here to satisfy my need for an introduction to this article about The Past, The Present and The Future.

Anyway, our Past does make us do things in the Present, depending on how good we are at movin’ on and

  1. Forgetting the Past
  2. Recreating it to suit our Present modes of behaviour
  3. Remembering it and never moving into the Present
  4. Learning from it and designing our Present to support our roadmap into the Future

It all depends on what we want from people and the world in our Future. Do we want apologies? Plaudits? Fame? Fortune? Or do we want peace for ourself, within ourselves?

I shall use, because I say say so, and this is my article, written by me, my own Past, Present to ask questions about my Future. So then!

Read on!

Past

 Image credit: https://www.kolbusopedia.com/ No copyright infringement intended.

Food is essential. It’s an integral part of staying live, giving you the energy you need to put on your white suit, undo the top two buttons of your close-fitting shirt and perform those moves on the brightly-lit floor in time with the pulsating beat paired with those falsetto voices.

The daily bread, is something most of us need to keep us going. Except, of course, the ultra rich, who don’t necessarily need it to be “daily”, and those who abhor bread, and/or do not include it in their diets, for reasons of geography, local cuisine, taste, medical or other reasons.

This is isn’t about them.

It’s about the concept of bread. A miracle of birth involving flour, water and salt in a sort of incestuous ceremony, a celebration of the joining of chemistry, biology and physics, if you will.

So let’s talk about it.

Or as I call it, IT.

Information Technology is the long form for IT. And IT paid for many things in my life. And, yes, some of it was bread.  Also, jam. There was a time when the bread was not daily. And of those days has it been written that the world spun and a young couple went to bed tired, nay, exhausted, for penury had marked them for her own.

The 90-minute ride in the #3D/1 bus from Majerhat to Maniktala, for the princely sum of 15 paise, the 1-rupee spent on a precious lunch of dry muri, mixed with raw onions and channachur, the 15 paise bus ride home, are but memories now.  The lessons to bored housewives, of such esoteric tools such as Wordstar and Supercalc, and later, dBaseII, which last item I came to recognize as the work of Satan himself.

But they are never to be forgotten.

Digression Alert #1: Satan had much to say in these tools, most notably in the creation of the Ctrl key and the “shortcuts” that it represented. For who else but Satan would invent Ctrl-C to Cut and Ctrl-V for Paste? Intuition, Satan’s, not any human’s, surely, would substitute the P for a V?

The Past was all about IT and getting food on the table.

But all that is in the past, and as my IT professional career comes to a stuttering halt, I bring you to the

Present

My Present, to you, as a seen on social media is one thing. Real life is another.

I’m retired after 40 years of working hard to make sense of what I saw, observed and tried to solve. I had a very short, mercifully short, stint in the accounting world. And then a wholesome career in technology. Now, that’s over! The powers that be have gotten tired of me doing the things that they were busy producing Powerpoints about. So they gave me a citation for “actually doing, while we were talking about doing”, a $50 gift card and showed me where the door was. “Bye Bye! Don’t forget to ship us the laptop and the VPN securekey!”

So here I am. I travel. I write. I put my old book out into paperback. (Finally, you say! Well, I was busy working hard for the $50 gift card.) I collated a set of 21 short stories and put that collection out. I’m working on other stories. Above all, I’m doing what I’ve always had the talent for.

Annoying people.

No, not writing! That’s not going anywhere, despite the fabulous fiction, poetic prose and shocking stories I have released.

I have a fair amount of free time, so I think. And so, I thought about the days that just went by and what I have heard, seen or read about. About the neighbourhood.

The past months have seen violent crime suddenly rear its ugly head.

Up a few kilometres, a car technician, disgruntled at his boss, went to a coffee shop, shot a policeman, who was peacefully, and I presume, dutifully, eating a donut, raced around to the garage where he worked and shot an innocent colleague. I mean, I’m allowed, therefore, to show some mild bitterness over that $50 gift card, right? I mean, I didn’t shoot anyone. I politely gasped, accepted gracefully, and have simply allowed my bitterness to show up in this article, just a tad.

And a week before that, right up the street, off which the street on which I live is, and down the way where we often do our walky loop, we heard and then saw a number of police cars racing down. Turns out that some lady was shot by a member of her family. At her doorstep. A doorstep that is a mere kilometre (5/8ths of a mile, if American) or so from my own doorstep.

Then a couple, apparently Sikh, had an altercation in a store east of us called Canadian Tire, which sells, among auto parts, everything from bicycles, skates and cooking pans, patio and lawn furniture etc. It also sells tires, not all of which are Canadian. Not important, what they sell there, Ajesh! Yeah. Well, I guess you’re right.

Yes, the husband took a spanner and beat his wife to death in one of the aisles. The store sells tools, too, you know. Thus the easily available spanner.

And just last week, a guy walked into a gas station and shot the 21 year old attendant, Panwarjeet Kaur, dead.

Now, you remember, or not, that my oven has become a tad temperamental in its temperature control. Yes, it’s become quite unreliable. It’s ruined a loaf of sourdough bread, a batch of cranberry scones. The fridge has an ice maker and water dispenser, that leaked into my basement. It’s been fixed for now. Now, the dishwasher has the a broken spring thingy that used to keep the door from cracking your knee as you opened. Now you have to open it carefully, and jump aside as the door falls open.

Also, the guy who laid the tiles in the kitchen didn’t do a great job, and the party of the second part has been complaining recently, about that and the need to redesign the cupboards and counters, to create more and more easily accessible storage, improve counter space, clean up the backsplash and make the entire kitchen functionally superior.

Meanwhile, there’s a Memoir, with a detailed account of my Past. Two novels languishing. Another play waiting in the wings, as it were. Travel plans are being made for another trip. There’s the grocery shopping, the season for parties and dinners is over, so that leaves us with time to think.

The Present is all about thinking, cogitating, ruminating and planning.

So, here I am with a couple of choices (see!) about the

Future

I could get someone in to redo the kitchen. Which means, I may as well redo the hardwood floors in the family room, the reception room and the dining room. Of course, the tiles continue into the jacket and shoe closet opposite the “powder room”, which contains a slightly eccentric flush / toilet and a sink with no storage. The tiles finish off in there.

So here we are then. With decisions to make.

  1. Should I redo the entire main floor?
  2. Does that include a complete makeover of the powder room?
  3. What about the weird closet? (the door of this closet, the door of the powder room and the door to the laundry room collide with each other when open – a crazed architect no doubt designed the layout of this house. Remind me to talk about the staircase, long corridor like rooms and the wasted space in the master bedroom. Someothertimeperhaps,eh?)
  4. Simply change the appliances?
  5. Should I move to another house, somewhere nearby?
  6. Sell this house and move to short term rentals in Europe
  7. Buy a run down chateau in Bordeaux and renovate that instead?
  8. Or?

What are your views? As they say in India, in Hindi, “Aapki kya rye hai?”

Remember: The books I’ve written, so far, don’t add much to the exchequer, so far. I fully expect the day to arrive when more books are released and Hollywood/Bollywood/Netflix/Prime are camped outside my door, chequebooks (checkbooks, if American) in hand, waiting, dying, vying to pay me vast sums of money for my stories. Or not.

The Future isn’t quite clear, yet.

The Future is likely all traveling and writing.

So, there you are tasked with the important questions of our (my) time. See above options. Give me your take on this.

Check out this poetry as you ponder, wonder, and grow fonder of the type of tasks I tasked you with.

There once was a man named Stew
Whose shirts were always blue
He tried and he tried
But couldn’t abide
The sound of those who chew

In his youth he played cricket
Lost and took many a wicket
Now he follows online
always ready to opine
For it only takes just a minute

He thought about things to write
as he dreamed by day and by night
The ideas required action
and didn’t give satisfaction
So he left them sit at “I might”

Conclusion

The Past was all about IT and getting food on the table. The Present is about thinking about what I want to do now.

The Future?

Who knows. I await your responses!

This article is likely being written in a chateau in the Loire Valley. I mean, how can you verify it isn’t, eh?

 

 

 

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