A bittersweet future

I’ve had it with technology. In the last week, I’ve had so many frustrating experiences with failing gizmos that I want to destroy every electronic device I see. Have you ever fantasized about taking the smallest little gadget you can find and whipping it into the screen of the next largest gadget and so on until you’re standing topless on a heap of sparking burning glass and plastic in the middle of Futureshop, screaming at the sky and blowing an air horn? How that would be grand.

Don’t get me wrong, I know we need machines, but I think I prefer simple mechanical devices like bicycles or hand mixers that have a physical elegance that buttons can’t satiate. You crank something, a gear turns and something happens. Simple, right? No scrolling endless menus of icons, no pinching little screens. I’m sure I’ll get lots of hate mail from snarky tweens calling me a Luddite for not being up on the latest Tweeter posts or watching the hottest YouTubes, but I don’t give a shit. I’ve had it with science—except for maybe that Electronic Food Dehydrator thing which actually looks pretty awesome.

I suppose one other piece of advanced technology that would be nice to have is a time machine. But not to use in a cliché way like betting on dog fights or killing Hitler (which is a total time machine noob move), but just to see what life would be like in a different era. I’d like to go to prehistoric times when things were simpler, when instead of a vacuum cleaner, you had a baby woolly mammoth, and your razor was just a clam with a bee in it.

I’m curious what living simpler would do to my state of mind. Today, we’re faced with an endless amount of choices and possibilities, but are we actually better off? Maybe we wouldn’t have so many societal hang-ups if we grew up in a time when things were more certain and we had fewer options. What’s on the menu today, Indian, Sri Lankan, Ethiopian? No. It’s whatever you or your neighbour killed or harvested. What do you want to do with your life? Well, my dad was a blacksmith and my dad’s dad was a blacksmith and he taught me everything I know, so I guess… assistant director of human resources?

After a week of cursing my phone, computer, television and mp3 player, and desperately longing for that simpler life, I decided to do some time travelling of my own. That’s right, I went to a cabane à sucre.

Okay, fine. Visiting a sugar shack is not exactly like time travel, but I figured it’s the closest thing to uncomplicated living I could experience that also included an all-you-can-eat, maple-drenched buffet. Besides, this is the perfect time for “sugaring off,” and I didn’t want to miss the rustic experience of taking a hayride while my belly was full of classic Queb dishes like “Christ’s Ears” and “Old Man in Syrup.” I figured this would be a great way to get in touch with the rural life I so longed to be a part of, so I loaded up a van full of friends and north we went.

The place was rather large and—despite the fact that the first thing we saw upon entry was a woman changing her baby on a dining room table—rather quaint, with a fireplace and rows of tables with red-checkered covers. After a delicious meal consisting of at least six different ways to prepare pork came the moment I was waiting for: the hayride. I knew that it would be the rustic balm to my modernist ennui. The site of all those metal buckets hanging off the trees, the thought of the careful collection of the sap pails by human hands… I knew the whole experience would transport me to a time where machines didn’t rule the world and things were less complicated.

To my horror, when we actually got on route, there was not a metal bucket in site. In their place was a complicated network of neon blue tubing zigzagging from tree to tree forming a complex Tron-like grid throughout the entire forest. “What is that?” I cried incredulously. “Where are the buckets?”

The driver explained, “Oh, we got rid of that system years ago. Now we have a big machine that sucks out the sap and collects it into the shed over there. It’s really high-tech.”

He pointed to a small lean-to with steam coming out of it. I was devastated. “This is how Terminators would make maple syrup!” I looked up at the sky, screamed and blew my air horn, but in a really sad way.

RIFF-RAFF@SYMPATICO.CA