In 1989, when Back to the Future II was released, 2015 seemed a long way off. Anything seemed plausible.

Bells cling-clanged off the clay roofs in the farming village of Codogno, Italy, to introduce me to the year 2015. Red and yellow fireworks exploded over the church clock tower as it struck midnight. On this day 1989 seemed a long way off.

In the 1989 version of the future there is no need for roads. Cars fly. In this future wall-sized televisions project scenes of nature in front of windows, shoes tie themselves, re-hydrators turn mini pizzas into large, hot, steaming meals in seconds, children wear digital projection glasses to the dinner table to watch shows and answer telephone calls while they eat. Gadgets do what we wished we could and what we no longer wanted to do.

In the present 2015 I still have to tie my own shoes, and the man down the street spins pizza by hand from the center of a small mountain of white flour.

Should I be living my life this way?
We have lost ourselves in the coulds and shoulds.
Asking distracts from what is, and we become irritable with the present.
This moment is a culmination of what has happened at the intersection of what will.
Should I be an artist?
Art, in its purity, is not something one should or should not do. It is creation coming from everything that is presently you. Everything else is immitation or failed attempts.

I must be a Democrat. Surely I must be. If I dream of one day reading a book while lounging back in my seat as I travel from one United States city to the next in a high speed train, then I must be a Democrat. Or would I simply be a human hoping for the sanity of when I don’t hop in my car, which costs me hundreds of dollars to maintain and insure every year, weave my way into a four-lane highway of traffic and nervously shark my way into an hour-long search for a parking spot? Please help me to understand were I fit in the political spectrum of ideas. I need to pick a side. November is just next month.
I’m being told of certain hopeful politicians blowing rhetorical smoke of “subsidizing” rail infrastructure, and how we can’t afford such a scheme, in hopes of striking a nerve in fear of “big government” and higher taxes. Don’t we, the tax payer, pay for the roads that grow wider with every American Recovery and Reinvestment dollar spent? Don’t we pay for the ring roads that circulate traffic around cities causing suburb ring, after suburb ring, after suburb ring…?
Ohio is being offered 8 billion dollars to connect the three C’s, Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati, cities rotting from the core due to suburb growth. The politicians are divided down party lines as to whether or not the state should accept federal dollars for such an endeavor.
The third largest recipient of American Recovery and Reinvestment dollars in Ohio is American Electric Power (AEP), the single largest land owner in the state. They will receive over 300 million dollars to install pollution controls in their smokestacks (scrubbers). This is the equivalent of me getting a government grant to put a new exhaust pipe on my 1980 diesel Volkswagen. Ahh… ha! I’ll look into it.