Time Travellers from the 1960's : Ch.10 : Past and Present

Chapter 10 : Past and Present

“You know Ted we had it lucky,” said Louise. “We were the people of the past, the sixties and seventies generation. In our circles there were plenty who wanted to experiment, sexually, artistically, socially and in many other ways. We were making the rules for ourselves. But many things seem to have changed for the worse. For a start there was the Aids scare in the eighties and nineties. They seem to have got some control of it in the West at least. At least there aren’t too many people dying from it here now, although sadly I don’t think that’s so in the poorer parts of the world. They seem to have got treatments which can protect and keep sufferers alive, in the countries with good healthcare systems at least. I believe people are protecting themselves from it and other sexually transmitted diseases.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard about the Aids scare,” agreed Ted. “It was bad. We’re very lucky. Who knows what might have happened to us if we’d stayed in our proper time. We mixed with plenty of swingers and promiscuous people. Who knows whether we might have picked it up. I’ve used a condom with all my recent sex partners, including Cheryl, but when we first arrived in ‘our future’ we didn’t know anything about it did we?

“Well, I suppose most of the early cases were gay men, in the West at least, but it certainly spread to heterosexuals too. It’s a good thing Belinda mentioned it to me, but that wasn’t before I had sex with that young guy at the club,” said Louise. “It wasn’t something Future Investments had got built into their health programmes. Belinda says they have incorporated into their ‘Awakening guidelines’, so the next travellers who come through will get full information on Aids and other sexual risks, or any recent health scares, soon after awakening.

“I don’t think they realised that most of us New Seminarians of the Future were likely to be promiscuous swingers,” said Louise. “Not enough of us have been coming through over the years for that oversight to have been noticed. Anyway, we’re clean. We’ve both been tested for Aids or HIV!

“Most people are using condoms now when they have sex with newcomers or strangers,” Louise went on. “The Aids scare did cause a lot of people to change their habits and cut down the risks by having less affairs, by not being promiscuous.

“Our generation, even the ones who’ve lived right through the times we should have lived, they don't fully appreciate what it’s like today. It’s difficult for many today to find a partner.”

“Is that so?” said Ted, not quite sure what she was getting at.

“Young professional women in the big cities follow certain rules,” continued Louise, explaining some of the theories she had heard or read about, or observed in the modern society around them. “Women expect to be wined and dined by men, and chased by them. These women have the attitude that they're clever, that therefore suitable men should come looking for them. They don’t realise at first that the so called good jobs are ones where they sell their souls, becoming something preordained by the top businessmen and professionals who design these modern workforces. Consumerism rules. Investment Managers, accountants, lawyers, personal assistants, computer advisors and operators must look good, all of them. They bring their work efficiency into their personal lives. Image, impressions, glamour, being entertained and chased by men are more important than actually having sex.

“The woman of the past, where we come from, the sixties, seventies, even the eighties, until Aids exploded, might have had affairs with 2 or 3 people at work at same time. Men used to chat women up confidently, now women are too choosy, ask lots of questions first, don't have much time to waste on men who aren't good enough. Where have the good easygoing times gone. Investment manager or successful professional type males in recent years were not looking to settle down fast. They used women, and women responded by becoming choosy and hard to get, by expecting the men to pay for the costs of socialising.

“It seems the liberations of the 60's and 70's brought increased expectation for personal quality of life in personal life, leisure, and at work,” Louise went on. “A generation or two of kids grew up receiving confused signals about what to expect in the future. Switch on the TV and the kids saw paradise approaching. The same applied to music. When they finally got to work things weren't quite so rosy. Many of this lucky generation found themselves unemployed and begging for work in the 80's and early 90's.The renewed and increased pressures of modern work practices and international competition kept them working hard afterwards. Paradise had come close, but was lost!

“The new generations growing up encountered the same confused signals. Many of them were a lazy and misguided generation. Their cultural levels were dropping too. Try listening to their new musics for a while and see what you think. Many of them were no longer reading books; many of them liked to behave like monkeys; for some hoods came back into fashion; teenage girls started smoking in droves. In 20 or 30 years they would be dying in droves as a result. Drink was also a problem. 'Brainy' students and 'funloving' women alike embarked on an alchoholic journey to an early grave. What has been happening to society while we’ve been in deep storage?”

“We can’t get out of here,” cried Louise bitterly on another occasion. “We must have been mad.”

“We’d have got here in the end, even if we had stayed,” said Ted.

“But we’d have had a few more good years,” said Louise. “We’ve landed in a mad world. It hasn’t improved at all.”

“Well there’s nothing we can do about it. Just relax. Stay cool, and we’ll get through.”

“But I’ve lost my job, and I find I don’t really want another one, because they’re all so pointless, or so unpleasant,” moaned Louise. “There’s no satisfaction to be had from office work in this modern world. Why do they have to drive everyone so hard?”

“People find ways to cope,” said Ted. “I know it’s not easy, but a lot of people are happy enough here and now.”

“I know,” conceded Louise. “I’ve got to have a job, because neither of us can afford to live here without workin’ hard.”

“I thought the future was gonna be better than what we had in the sixties and seventies. True it looks better, but when you go to work and live the lifestyle it’s no good at all. Back in our day people had fun at work. Workers took it easy after lunch and there was no boss standing over us with a whip. Here I took that first office job. The boss was a mean minded woman who believed in efficiency as the foundation of all life. If we weren’t ‘motivated’ there was something wrong with us. If we weren’t working fast enough we must be slacking.

“I came to the future thinking I would have a good time, being confident about myself, liking people, liking men, being trusting with women. Instead I have found myself losing my belief in leadership and management. I was starting to think I wasn’t as good as all the other workers. I have found that a lot of women deserve the description of bitches, and that many modern men are immature and uncultured!”

“Remember that first time we swung?” said Ted.

“Yeah of course! How could I forget?” said Louise.

“We’d been together for quite a while, and we had a great sex life,” said Ted

“But we both wanted more,” explained Louise. “We both heard from friends who’d tried swinging. They liked it. They felt it made them more complete human beings, more independent from each other. Stronger as individuals, but appreciative of each other because they were partners in an adventure, sharing experiences, helping each other to explore new partners, fulfil fantasies, to give our natural instincts and desires a full rein.

“We were revolutionaries, not wanting to live our lives in the staid prescribed way our elders did. We were young, and free to create new ways of living and behaving, which would enrich our lives. The friends who had been there before us made sexual adventure sound attractive, a harmless experience.

“So we went along to the group on swinging night. I wanted to feel more than one man’s hands on me at one time. I didn’t want another soulmate. Ted was enough of a soulmate for me already. I just wanted to feel the hands of strangers massaging my body, and poking me with their cocks. I’d had standard one partner sex. Now I wanted to experiment, to find something more exciting.”

“What did you want Ted?” Belinda asked him.

“I wanted as many female bodies as I could get my hands on,” laughed Ted. “But I didn’t want to lose Louise. She was my best friend then, and still is now.”

Ted had a relationship with a young lady who he initially thought might be amenable.

She was a nice young lady. He had found she was good to talk to, educated, polite, informative, interesting, full of social graces as so many women were. She was younger than him by seven or so years, lively, and lovely as younger women always were. But as the hours went on and the days passed, his picture of her changed as he saw through her. He knew she was bored with him already, she had found out everything she needed to know. When he tried to make conversation she was always polite, friendly to a point, but this was work time and she had her own targets to achieve. He was not one of her aims or an important part of her forward progress. She probably liked him well enough, but the affair was going nowhere and he ended it before she did.

Louise talked to Ted one evening, “Healers are the musicians and the artists, and the writers, who make us feel, the men or women who are prepared to be our lovers, the people who are real and make us want to live. The killers are the greedy, the ambitious, the ones who want to devote our lives to barren wastelands of repetitive non life.

“Why is it that Americans, and I suppose all the capitalist world have allowed the healers to be overrun by the oppressors of life? Why can't we be brought into sunlight to enjoy and cherish our gifts instead of wasting so much of our lives for the petty benefit of those who seem not to value our lives as they should?”

He wondered why the world's imperatives, business and success were so removed from the thoughts and priorities which affected or motivated him. So much of business and bureaucracy seemed unnecessary, irrelevant, uninteresting. The real factors in life were ignored. People went to work for years, struggling to succeed or to stay in the race, bored by their lives. The solutions should have been to hand. They wanted meaning, self fulfilment, purpose, sexual or social intimacy. Few found enough of these to satisfy. Instead much of their lives were spent indulging someone else's plan, not attaining their own. What a waste; his own included.