#99 Trouble Brewing

So I’m driving around the other day, and like most of the time when I’m out on the road, I notice things. The first thing I notice is that there’s a new building along Highway 101. It’s beautiful. Red brick with a pointed roof over a cupola type thing. And I remark to myself, looks like the old brewery. Tumwater, you may recall, was pretty much put on the map by the old Olympia Brewery—the one way down by the lake. And in recent years, Tumwater city hall, the new Tumwater fire department, and just about every building that wants to be Tumwater-anian has followed that architectural archetype and tried to evoke the nostalgic warmth of that golden bygone era of wobbly-lynching and horsecrap in the streets by constructing modern buildings into brewery look-alikes. Funny thing is, no one will buy the actual old brewery, which is even now sitting in decaying decrepitude in the heart of old Tumwater. Much cheaper to build a new building than renovate one that, as of this date, has survived flood, wind, and three major earthquakes. Too bad the city leaders can’t slap an architectural copyright tax on all the new buildings to fund a makeover for their aging inspiration.
While on that same road, I was treated to another blast from the past: A ‘59 Caddie. It’s hard to believe that our nation’s automotive hubris ever got that swollen. This thing was about 5 blocks long. And its fins stretched up about three stories. I’ve never a seen a car take up that much road. Looked like it had a lot of trunk space though. If the designers had been smart, they would have used the space inside those fins as backup gas tanks. Even at 35 cents a gallon, it must have taken a fair chunk of change to gas that thing up. I don’t think they got more than 10 miles a gallon. I thought to myself, boy how did we ever get that stupid? Then it occurred to me. 45 years from now guys like me will be saying the same things about Humvees. Hell, I say it now. Funny how in the past, they thought that to make a car look like a car of the future, you had to streamline it and slap on huge sweeping fins, but how the direct descendant of that same automotive excess, here in the future, is an chunky, armored-plated, big square box. From land yacht to urban assault vehicle.
If this keeps up, and all the fossil fuels get guzzled, I know exactly what the vehicle of our future will look like. It’ll run on renewable agricultural resources and its only emissions will be natural gas and occasional solid deposits that can be recycled to grow more of its fuel. Most versions will run on one horsepower, but richer people will no doubt be able to afford six horsepower. Some will run on dried grass stalks but higher performance versions will require oats and possibly even corn. Strangely, some of the new transportation devices will be called Pintos, though any explosion engendered by hitting them in the rear end will most likely not be flammable. And the future descendent of the ‘59 Caddy and the Hummer? That’ll be called a Clydesdale.
America, ya gotta love it.