I wrote this on some sort of word processor in the 1980s. It got printed, partly, in Amerikan Uutiset at the time. I have not checked the google translation. It was here in Finnish in 2006
Thursday, November 30, 2006
Explorations into the future and the past
PART 1
I didn't believe at all 30 years ago that I would still be alive in 2035. Somehow I just thought that my wife would live longer than me. And that's how it sometimes seemed. That pacemaker has been there for a long time. The last time they removed the prostate, but now they know how to install the pipes and muscles to make it work, the urine works really well now.
I'm in my neighbor's apartment this week, the same two-room apartment in a serviced apartment as mine. Or that neighbor, Richard, just died, and the apartment is now temporarily empty. I asked them to replace the carpets in my apartment, the previous tenant had a cat. Here I am with my cardboard boxes. I only brought the radio out here. The multi-function machine is on the wall of my own apartment. I don't even bother to go there to read my emails. There are still a couple of hours until I go downstairs to the canteen and then I sit there where they watch the tea. I can't really make out the sound on the TV and I don't feel like reading the lyrics. I have better company on the radio, and I like listening to classical music. I still have a few working CDs from the last century. It was quite a struggle to find a player that still played those first-generation CDs. At the beginning of the century, I even got excited about recording a bunch of old LPs onto CDs, but none of them play anymore. After that, I kept collecting quite a lot of records. We still had those records in our house ten years ago, but I'll tell you about them in a moment.
Yes, I don't really speak Finnish, although I type messages to old acquaintances in Finland. One of them was enthusiastically involved in Njet (those message board forums before the year 2000), back then when the Internet was wild and free. I've never met this acquaintance either, although we've been exchanging messages for 35 years. I can't afford to travel to Finland anymore, people don't fly much except for business and then only on vacation to their home continent. I can only really use Finnish when talking to Niilo, and that can take two months at a time. Niilo, a bachelor, has lived here in Wisconsin since 1973 in the same building, except for 1976 when he was in the army in Finland. Then he gradually finished his PhD thesis in history sometime in 1998. I persuaded Niilo to apply for a green card through the lottery and he got it. Since then, Niilo has been here permanently. He edits a very small history publication, Early Modern England, and I think he's over 85 now. Niilo, not that publication.
I don't move around much, but I take the senior citizens' bus to Niilo's place, where we eat at a small deli and walk a kilometer along the lake shore. Then I take the regular bus back to that shopping center, which is now more of an entertainment venue, since everything is ordered by mail except shoes and such. And I can see and order those things there too. From there, the minibus picks me up here.
Cities have changed in recent years to the point where they are building more solid and well-lined terraced houses and apartment buildings and really nice yards. We also had a detached house, but it is now so far away that not many people can afford to drive that far every day. Cars, these LPG/electric ones, are quite expensive, almost a year's salary for many. And our area will soon be razed to the ground, even though I still own the plot and the house. I was visiting the house two years ago when my son came with his wife and rented a car for a week. We collected the last things from the house that they wanted now. There were some broken books and those old LP records in the basement. Those records are mostly in Finnish, no one cared for them when I offered my entire collection for a few dozen ten years ago. So they did take those American records. My wife gave away her Danish ones, they wouldn't have taken them either.
The weather is really nice, spring is coming. For some reason, I'm often in a very good mood in my old age. Children have been a joy. The girl is in Finland, she's one of those green people. But there are real jobs in that field these days, there's no need to just stop at protesting. But it was the same for them as it was for us, and there's no point in demanding grandchildren from the girl, she's so caught up in her career. The son has a little daughter now, but they're also far away in California. In that remaining part of California.
Part 2
We reached the end of the 29th century, when young music student Rik Tompson arrived on his research trip to a thousand-year-old suburb outside an abandoned town in Wisconsin. Rik and a couple of friends had dug the foundations of three detached houses by hand. The others were looking for recyclable material. According to energy regulations, tractors or other machines were not allowed for such a hobby. You had to wear a dust mask because of possible asbestos and you had to bring drinking water for the whole weekend.
In the ruins of the third house, piles of recyclable plastic, such as children's toys, were found. In those days, oil was scarce, and polyethylene, for example, was made from ethanol, which could only be made from agricultural waste and cellulose. Many everyday items were made from polymers made from fiberglass or cellulose.
Rik had not yet found what he was looking for on this trip, until hundreds of vinyl LPs and a smaller number of polycarbonate CDs were found in the basement of a private house. A dispute arose over the division of the spoils. Rik wanted to restore the records, while others wanted to recycle. In the end, Rik gave the CDs to others because they were difficult to restore, the entire metal foil had disappeared. However, Rik was able to see the faint words when he held the CD up to the light and was disappointed to find that they were all classical music. All of them were from the last two centuries, and all were perfectly fine and orthodox performances. The baroque musicians of the time believed that they were closer to the 18th century style of performance than any of their predecessors. The LPs were more difficult to classify, because the cardboard cases and labels had disappeared due to the weather. There was some engraved text on the surface of the disc.
Rik guessed that the collection contained a lot of material that wasn't even archived in the country's capital, Chicago. The USA had recently been divided into six parts for administrative reasons. Three of the parts included the populated areas of Canada further north. Rik lived in Mid-USA, the part south of which was called Louisiana.
The guys collected plastic in full loads on their electric pedals. They had to pedal uphill, otherwise they moved at a slow speed even without pedaling. Rik, on the other hand, ordered an electric van with his mobile phone. The records were loaded in the same order into boxes that the driver brought. The driver also got excited about digging out porcelain dishes from the ruins. Today's ones were rather boring and impersonal mass-produced. Like almost all consumer goods.
Rik lived with his parents in a small apartment where he had a kind of loft above the living room. He had to rent a storage locker in the apartment complex for the records and his work. There, Rik numbered all the records and stored the remnants of the labels that were in the center of a few records in plastic bags. Rik had already made a record player that played at all 20th-century speeds, up to 78 rpm. Before that, nothing worth playing had been found. Record companies in the 20th century had only released a 20-record set of 20th-century music. The records were made of hardened glass and only three in the set contained rock. He had collected 100 other rock records from hobbyists. From distant Estonian-Finnish (Finland itself was sparsely populated north of Uusimaa, and had been annexed to Estonia. The languages had merged over the years) he had received a few from a collecting society. One was Eppu Normaali and the other was someone named Wigwam, who had indeed sung in English. English had changed a lot too, but with the help of dictionaries he could read it like that. The Estonian-Finnish Association enthusiastically received the news of the discoveries, even though they did not understand the Finnish of the time very well. There was little demand for it, and the main works had been translated into the modern language, Estonian-Finnish.
Using a computer equipped with a microscope, Rik separated the scratches on the record from the grooves, and the same machine engraved the read groove on another record. The copy obtained in this way was almost free of rust. Once the copy was made, the original could be recycled into vinyl. This way, only one of the three hundred records had to be sacrificed. Riks played that one first and recorded it in digital format. However, it was some kind of K-tel collection, whose artists he could not find out. When Rik had finished the job, it turned out that about a hundred records were in Finnish. He donated a few, but he sold most of them as copies to Estonian-Finnish collectors. This led to a new enthusiasm for Finnish rock, from which young people recognized the "feel" of the era, even if they did not know the words very well. The names of the performers were usually not found out, so Juice was made Einari, Hector was made Mandolin Man. Rik eventually donated his collection, which included entertainment from many countries, to the state collections in Chicago. He then started building instruments of the time himself.
Part 3
What was the music of Rikki's own time? It was a kind of sung light pop, which professional musicians accompanied with classical instruments, such as strings. The electric bass had remained, however. The bands could not afford to travel, so the music was heard in live TV broadcasts in medium-sized clubs. The bands' most loyal fans were always there to fill in for the larger audience. The TV broadcast was followed by performances by a couple of hundred people in clubs. The club members always voted every two hours on what program to watch. Once a week there was their own two-hour broadcast.
In the classical-jazz side, composer-conductors traveled from city to city with only a change of clothes and a baton in their bag. Other musicians no longer traveled, but had to be content with each city's local professional association. California set its own quota for performing musicians, otherwise they would have had too many in relation to the population.
