There was a period a few weeks back where this site was getting bombarded by spam comments. Out of nowhere, there would be somewhere in the region of 30-50 spam comments daily, all of them either auto-generated by some nefarious AI that had been fed information on fashion designers of the 1970s and ‘80s — yeah, I don’t know why either, but all of the comments were related in some way to ‘70s and ‘80s designers; go figure — or were cut and pasted from some arcane essay somewhere. Either way, there was one comment that kept repeating, over and over, for the week or so that the spam attack kept happening:
“But the future is fascinating.”
That was it: one line, as opposed to the multi-paragraph comments that surrounded it every time it appeared. “But the future is fascinating.” Everything else would refer to Karl Lagerfeld or Ray Halston or whoever, just screeds of theorizing about what they brought to the fashion scene of the era, but then there would be this singular line that would reappear daily. The future is fascinating.
I love that line; the more I saw it as I deleted the various comments, the more I loved it. Sure, it’s almost certainly as random and automatically generated as everything around it, but it stood out and felt unusually important and filled with potential for something good or ill: “fascinating,” after all, could mean either.
It’s stuck with me in the weeks since, and I keep thinking about it on a worryingly regular basis. Out of a spam nowhere, I think I’ve found my ideal approach to life from now on. If nothing else, dear friends, let us always remember to keep our futures fascinating. We can but hope.