I have seen the light

Curmudgeons beware. The future will be better than the present. Not in every respect, certainly. But in the way our present is demonstrably better than our past, our future is shaping up to be incrementally better than our present. You want evidence? Okay, there's a British company making glow-in-the-dark asphalt surface that promises to significantly reduce the need for electrical lighting on bike paths and streets. How cool is that? Imagine being able to clearly see where you're going as you navigate your bike through the woods. Imagine how much money is spent illuminating streetlights along such paths and roadways that could be saved if such a system proves practical (hint: it's millions and millions).

Imagine being able to ride your bike on a dark path without a light. Imagine being able to see the edge of a path with no painted lines - even after dark. Imagine reducing the amount of ambient light so you can see the stars again. That is actual progress. I doubt that this would be a replacement for street lights on busy roads, but anything that can reduce electrical costs for lighting, reduce light pollution and improve visibility in low light areas seems like a good idea to me. And from the sound of it, this could even save municipalities money on infrastructure costs.

So, still not convinced that the present is better than the past or that the future will be better than the present? Well, perhaps you should read the exhaustively researched The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker, currently on Bartlebones' nightstand. The general premise is that it is now statistically the safest time to be alive in all of human history. So turn off the 24-hour [bad] news channel, tell your nutjob Tea Party friend he's wrong, and enjoy your life. Soon you'll be able to ride your bike in the dark and never slip off the pavement.

Hope springs infernal

Paul Rosenfeld has an interview in The Atlantic with Swedish documentary filmmaker Fredrik Gertten entitled The Rise of the Bicycle in the Twenty First Century. It would be easy to write this off as just another example of yet another Northern European attacking America's love of cars and their associated dependence on petroleum. Just another viking preaching about a transportation model and an attendant quality of life that cannot and never will be implemented in the United States. That is it would be easy if the model had not already started to gain traction in communities across the US, including right across the river in good ol' Arlington, Va. And increasingly in DC, and even right here in Bethesda, MoCo, MD, USA.

If I didn't know better, I might just start to feel a twinge of hope that at least some Americans are beginning to recognize that suburban, car-dependent communities suck and that human-scaled environments with pedestrian friendly infrastructure and public transportation (formerly known as "cities") potentially offer a higher quality of life, reduced environmental impact and a general improvement in the well-being of our citizens. Yeah, right...

In defense of idleness

The Atlantic has an extremely important article in the current issue entitled, Teach Kids to Daydream by Jessica Lahey. The topic is a particular bugaboo with me; a subject I return to time and again, about which I have even found myself in arguments with parents. I am a firm believer in the notion that children need unstructured time. I think many modern children live time-boxed over-scheduled lives that, combined with the saturation of electronic media have a devastating impact on their natural impulse to dream and imagine.

I've long maintained that boredom and idleness are the catalysts for imagination and creativity. In my own childhood I recall many a long, summer day filled with invention and discovery, as my brother and I roamed the woods, "explored" the local creek or built a tree house. Do today's kids even build tree houses? I'm sure some do, but I suspect they spend as much time figuring out how to get electricity and broadband access to it as they do actually building it. Then, instead of pretending it's a pirate ship sailing on a sea of acid, or writing a journal with entries that begin, "Day 39: I have secured shelter," they just sit inside it texting their friends about how great it is to be texting them from a tree fort. I dread the thought of having to read the books written by this generation, if such things still exist. So do me a favor and take Lahey's advice:

Teach your kids how to just be. How to value silence and be at peace with nothing but their thoughts to occupy them. Make the romantic notion of laying back on the soft grass with nothing to do other than to watch the clouds pass overhead a reality.

4 eyes

Looking back now I marvel at all the years I chose to see the world through disks of glass, peering through prismatic lenses so finely ground and polished. Those glossy optics inter-mediated my experience, framed my perception, protected me, an artificial eye between me and actual experience. As a photographer, the camera always dangling from a sling over my shoulder actually affected my posture with its ubiquitous, weighty presence, causing a slight slouch, a stoop, a very subtle listing to starboard. For many years that camera shaped my world and gave me focus. And quite literally reshaped me in the process.

Then of course I moved on to a different type of lens, a screen, whose cathode rays have now bombarded me for decades, whose plastic frame has provided a window through which I can interact with the world, can take it in, can stand witness, behind which I can hide. The voyeur needs the glass, the safety of the separation from the subject. But it's often hard to see how such things affect us, how they change us, how their very presence makes us something other than what we are without them. The glass is transparent, but not invisible.

Rudy Project Rydon

Now here I am, struggling to adjust to a new set of glass partitions whose strange disorienting parallax I must somehow come to integrate into myself; a prosthetic augmentation of my decaying senses that promises to restore what has through the years been lost, but which will in so doing fundamentally alter me. This new part of myself, this new way of seeing, of acting and being will take some adaptation. Even now, on this first night, I can sense the neurons rearranging themselves to accommodate the odd liquid pane through which I will ever after view the world. From this point forward I will be irrevocably changed. From now until the end of my life I will be a man who wears spectacles.

So if you see me staring vacantly off into space, idly staring out a window like a child in the back seat on a cross country road trip, don't just assume I am lost in my customary stupor. I may be engaged in re-configuring my brain to navigate a newly discovered world or merely marveling at the astonishing variety of textures in the road surface.