I took advantage of our spectacular weather this past Sunday to get out of the house, although the house was also filled with musicians, doing what musicians do. My presence was not necessary.

I headed south to downtown Seattle. I'm a comfortable suburbanite but I like shaking my world up occasionally, crossing the county line and doing things slightly out of my comfort zone (this would be parallel parking, mostly).

So I walked through sunny city streets, mingled with hordes, listened to some musicians of the street variety, and didn't see a single iPad. I looked, too.

You might think that downtown Seattle would a great place for a little high-tech voyeurism. Maybe it's too soon. Maybe the product that will finally Change The Way We Do Things hasn't been out long enough.

Maybe Seattle has a resistance to jumping on the Apple bandwagon, being sort of a company town, even if that company is in Redmond. Maybe, with iPods and iPhones, people have run out of pockets. Or else they're just tired of that lowercase "i" (it's driving my spellchecker crazy).

I have no intention of owning an iPad, and this is coming from a man who lusts after shiny things that beep at him. And I have no doubt that it'll show up soon in my peripheral vision, probably the next time I go to an airport. It looks useful and innovative; I just don't need or particularly want one, although that doesn't keep me from reading about it, and wondering.

Some of this is garden variety middle-age existentialism; I don't spend a lot of time musing on the meaning of life, but I'm acutely aware these days that life is limited and that I'm going to miss out on cool stuff. It doesn't bother me at all that a century from now my life will be a genealogy statistic (if that), but I sure wish I could get a peek at Coming Attractions. I'd like one look at the iBrain, that's all I'm asking.

Again, this is mostly midlife musing. For the first 30 years of my life, more or less, the world moved at a perfectly sedate technological pace, the biggest changes being probably home video and the absence of ashtrays. In the past 20, the lifetime of my youngest child, pretty much everything has changed, from communication to entertainment to working environment to personal navigation. And forget about finding an ashtray, if you're so inclined.

And nobody saw it coming, not this. Futurists, science fiction writers, innovators and big thinkers -- they got some things right, most wrong, and most never showed up on their radar. It's dicey to say that the past few decades have seen the most profound technological explosion in human history -- the invention of fire being a pretty big deal -- but life is different. Noisier and more intrusive, yeah, less privacy and overwhelming amounts of information, and we could have that conversation, but mostly I just wonder what's next and think about where we were.

In 1985, one of the year's hit movies was "Back To The Future," a cute film that hasn't particularly aged well but tweaked our collective imagination at the time. A Gen X teenager traveled from Ronald Reagan's America to Eisenhower's, and we could all laugh at the changes. Gas station attendants? Lack of diet soda? Segregation? One TV for an entire household? We'd come a long way, baby.

A remake today would send a kid born during the Clinton administration, reared on computers and probably with only a faint memory of VHS back to 1980, and now we're talking comic possibilities with his first attempt to make a phone call or find an address without GPS. Some news would sound familiar (Chrysler gets bailed out, but only 1.5 billion?) but most would be incomprehensible (Soviets? Abscam?), and good luck looking up information; I was born in 1958 and even I find the idea of a world without Wikipedia a little scary.

This contemporary Marty McFly might get into trouble accidentally spilling the secret of "The Empire Strikes Back" to a long line of moviegoers, might be puzzled by Pac-Man, and might wonder who J.R. is and why people are so interested in who shot him.

On the other hand, it would be a nice time to visit if he happened to be a hockey fan.

I've said it before in this space: Talk to me about "the good old days" and I'll be glad to give you a dozen bad things to balance the scales. It'd be nice to visit 1980 again, but only to visit, only to maybe warn John Lennon, place a bet on the Winter Olympics, and toss some investment capital in the direction of Cupertino, California.

Assuming I could find an ATM in 1980. Sigh. Think, McFly.