FutureTense

Reflections on then, now, and what is to come...

I’ve never been good at the future.

Even when it practically fell in my lap at the turn of the century, I was incapable of embracing it. It was 1999. I know this because my younger child sitting in her car seat was two years old. Driving down a street in the East Village, NY, I stopped at a red light and looked up at a series of letters at the bottom of a billboard.

The letters spelled www.something-I-do-not-now-remember.com.

Visit us at urged an invitation above what I learned was an “address.”

I scoffed. Who would waste their time going to a computer to type that in? (I only had a desktop then.) Why? To find what?

Who, indeed. And why, and what.

The future was smacking me in the face.

Clearly, I was not ready for the 21st century.

I have always been a skeptic,

a luddite, a late adopter. I have many stories of resistance to technology and machinery, whetted by seminal teenage readings of Fahrenheit 451, 1984, Brave New World, and Karel Capek’s play from 1920: R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots). And I do not like being told what to do.

“You’re a writer and you do not have a word processor?”

“You cannot be a writer unless you have a word processor.”

“You call yourself a writer?”

Such went assertions in the 1980s. I succumbed around ‘87. I bought a Tandy from Radio Shack -- remember them? It sat in its box for six weeks before I scissored it open at the insistence of my roommate’s girlfriend, a playwright. She helped me set it up, coached me on how to use it, and encouraged me to do so. I had been afraid of the process. Perhaps that is the key to my skepticism. Along with a lack of imagination. When asked to imagine the future, the only image I ever came up with was flying cars.

I did not imagine the future that is the present in which we are now living: a future that resembles a past that happened in other places. Not here.

As bad as I am at the future, I kick ass about the past.

I love timelines and cause and effect charts; I love to deconstruct and reconstruct, break down and put back together, scrutinize my origins courtesy of my family and culture, and analyze historical events and impacts. It’s one big seductive story with so very many points of view.

The not-so-distant past

of the late 1990s hailed the start of blogging. I knew about blogs. I read the ones my family and friends wrote. I nursed a blog idea for years. Smotherlove was its name. In my head, I wrote essays about my mother during her years of decline. Notes for blog posts are on my phone, on my laptop, in notebooks, on post-its, still. Yet I never created a blog or went public with one.

I didn’t recognize the freedom those early blogs provided, the community they offered. I wasn’t so much resistant as I was busy: teaching full-time, raising two children, sorting out how to be a single mother. Women who were in their twenties then (I was in my forties) uploaded their curiosities and ambivalences at rapid rates, and learned how to communicate across the medium with each other. They now have books which I check out of the library and read in single gulps. The books are confessional, insightful, relatable, in voices honed by those blogging years.

I am so late to the blog party

that blogs are no longer ubiquitous. But Substack is. Before the platform morphs into the next iteration of online something or other, I’ve taken my buried blog energy and put it into debuting FutureTense.

Join me as I contemplate the present, the past, and predictions of what is to come. Expect occasional posts of personal, cultural, and literary reflections, always for free. Thank you for reading, subscribing, liking, commenting, sharing — all the actions this space allows.

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Who is Pamela Gordon? Former NYC high school English teacher. Former adjunct college instructor. Former freelance writer for hire with stints as a theater critic; feature, newsletter, website, and health writer. Published in The New York Times, salon.com, Poets & Writers, More magazine, and Best Short Fiction 2022. Now happily retired and following a daily reading and writing schedule.