House of Future Past in Normal entries

Ok kids, so I woke at the crack of noon, for the second, that’s woke twice not a two-noon day, yawned, scratched, made a little coffee and stepped outside. “Oh Shit,” I oh shitted and went back in. 87 percent motherfucking humidity, it was like a swimming pool without filters out there. Um, it’s threeish now and I’m a little stupider and can’t think of the word to imply past perfect and forward, maybe it’s been and continues to be … Yeah, I didn’t get smarter in the middle of that sentence. My mission was to get stupid so, if you need foreshadowing, I obviously succeeded. I grabbed an ice cube and girded my loins. Heh, two separate activities, and wandered swampwards for drugs.

It’s possible they bred the paranoia out of marijuana, but my theory is that there isn’t anything to be paranoid about. I don’t drive stoned and my mom knows and sometimes participates. Cops, moms and significant others knowing the exact nature of that particular indulgence … shit, let’s try that again; I’m not keeping it a secret for fear of consequences. I was bound for the dispensary near the airport, the association being planes go high. There’s one a few blocks from a special school for chapter 1 students, the association being getting stupid. I’m not sure how universal a phrase that is, but among my associates it’s always been the go too e.g. “Ya wanna get stupid?”

Those of you who read my happy horseshit on OD and whose memory, unlike mine, is undimmed by time and consumption, might recall a few entries about The House Of The Future. The last one, ahem, the only one, I actually remember was about six years ago when I was visiting to see if the situation warranted me moving back to god forsaken swamp, and my buddies took me on a tour of the apocalypse or ‘Where-Things-used-to-be’. After an hour of looking at the rubble of the auto industry someone asked me if I wanted to see anything particular. I answered “The house of the future”. There were squeals of delight and we headed off towards the airport.

After an hour of driving around the neighborhood, the one just south of the airport, we were snapping at one another over where the fuck it was or even where it used to be. Google earth wasn’t any help (it wouldn’t have been anyhow, the house of the future had grand old Oak and Elm obscuring it from above) and even if we had stopped to ask someone, I’m not entirely sure everybody called it the house of the future. Doesn’t matter, we didn’t ask.

Today I did ask. I asked the lady who takes ID’s, without pause she said “It’s gone.” I was buzzed through the security door, picked out some brownies and stuff and asked the girl budtender. I prefaced it with “I think you’re probably too young” She told me she was older than she looked, I smiled and said “me Too” instead of the first thing that came to mind “You’d have to be, you look fifteen.” She had never heard of the house of the future. The front desk lady was one of women who looked somewhere between thirty and sixty, a really rough thirty or a well preserved sixty.

On my way out I asked her if she’d ever been there, anticipating swapping stories. “No, sweetie,” a term that made her sound older than me like a woman with a name tag reading Doris at a truck stop, “but my grandma showed me pictures” which made me sound older than God.

One of the upsides to this kind of pointless entry is that she’s the first person other than my friends who had ever heard of it. See it wasn’t a tourist attraction. You’d drive to this cul-de-sac, slip under the chain with the big NO TRESSPASSING sign (forgive us our trespasses) and hike about a half a mile through the woods, there wasn’t a trail, you had to either know where you were going or be really good at reading cold trails by slightly bent grass. There wasn’t a sign saying House of The Future and it had never been completed so it wasn’t ever anyone’s residence. There’s a whole subdivision back there now, oddly enough it’s a fancy neighborhood, high end. Nobody builds a rich neighborhood across the street from an airport. When the house of the future was built it’s possible the airport wasn’t there; I don’t know when it was built, it was already a delinquent property, the NO TRESSPASSING sign rusty and old and riddled with bullet holes when we found it in 1975. In 1975 the airport was small, mostly designed for private aircraft and puddle jumpers from Chicago, Minneapolis and Detroit. The neighborhood at that time was sparsely populated and marked by acres of land per house.

The downside would be that it’s gone, replaced by several ugly million-dollar homes and the noise that a (now) large airport brings. We figured that out ourselves six years ago when we couldn’t find it, we just never got confirmation, just a lot of “House of the what now?”

Fuck me. Grandma showed her pictures. Ouch.