I had the good fortune last week of attending the production of 1984 at the Canberra Theatre. It was a confronting performance, technically brilliant, terrifyingly too close to home, my only regret was that I was not emotionally enough drawn by the characters, Winston and Julia in particular, to care terribly much when they were being tortured.
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I am no theatre reviewer, indeed our own Alanna Maclean said it was "a difficult show but one that is unmissable", but I am forever linked to the year 1984.
That was the year I left high school, my HSC year, where, ironically we didn't actually study George Orwell's novel but Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Shakespeare's King Lear and a little Judith Wright poetry, if I remember correctly.
We were all, precocious students that we were, familiar with Orwell's Big Brother, but laughed in the face of any idea that suggested we would one day be controlled by any kind of regime.
Indeed, there was another loose 1984 connection that we felt more affinity with, a film called Class of 1984, which, for the record, came out in 1982, about a highschool gang who ruled the school.
"I am the future" was the tagline, the theme song of the same name sung by Alice Cooper (I've got my tickets to the Canberra show on October 23). We were the future and we would rule the world.
But here I'll digress for a while. I went back and watched this film for the purpose of research. God it was awful. And violent. And totally inappropriate for any 17 year old to be watching. What were my parents thinking? Or maybe they didn't even know we all snuck out to watch it at someone's house one night.
The film was about a music teacher who turns up to a new high school where teachers carry guns for protection and the students run strip clubs and sell drugs in their spare time.
Us mild-mannered students of Canobolas High School were never like this. The film ends with the students gang raping the music teacher's wife in her bedroom, which prompts the teacher to kill them all off one by one.
Just a regular school day in Orange. Not.
But I guess 1984, the play, got me thinking about how many popular culture references to dates stick in your mind.
How when we finally got to Judgement Day, August 29, 1997, as mentioned in Terminator 2, three billion people didn't die due to a nuclear strike incited by Skynet.
How when October 21, 2015, finally rolled around no one was riding on hoverboards like in Back to the Future II.
The Alien franchise kicked off in 2089 (which scarily isn't that far away now), when archeologists Elizabeth Shaw and Charlie Holloway discovered that fatal star map on some rocks in Prometheus.
Even closer is Blade Runner's setting of 2019, where replicants run wild and we're all zipping about in flying cars. That's two years away people.
I know, it's popular culture, but it's all got me thinking about how we might perceive a future we're writing about.
The recent Hulu production of Margaret Attwood's The Handmaid's Tale, seen here on SBS Demand, has totally freaked me out. Written in 1985, "set in a near future", it's like we're living it in 2017.
I interviewed Attwood once and we spoke about what she thinks will happen when we get to the "near future". She's hopeful that we'll still believe in hope. That we'll still take action.
I think that's the only view we can take when we're thinking about the future, our future. No matter what has happened in the past, your future is something you can't control. Even Doc and Marty didn't get it right with the help of the Delorean so what chance do the rest of us have?
Take each day as it comes, don't predict anything, have no expectations and then you won't be disappointed.
The only prediction, in regards to this whole popular culture thing, that I know has come true, is that just like Prince told us to do, we did party like it was 1999.
