Now I am not so sure.

Readers may recall that my car blew up on Interstate 76 outside Sterling, Colorado last month. Since then, I have had to learn to live a life without transportation, at least the internal combustion kind. It has opened up in my mind the possibility that the future may be whiz-free. We will spend much of our time as I am this week, sitting around.

The trend is called cocooning, named after the habit caterpillars have of sewing themselves up in little sleeping bags while they plot a make-over. Among people, cocooning denotes our increasing tendency to just drop out, stay home, and not venture into the troublesome and people-filled world outside. Whether a make-over is underway is uncertain, because so far no one has come back out.

The technologies driving cocooning are many. The telephone replaces the back fence. The VCR replaces the movie theater. The computer and modem replace the office. The Internet replaces the entire outside world.

One problem remains, and that is getting stuff. Without a car I am unable to fetch my weekly ten sacks of groceries from Piggy Mart.

It was my parents' anniversary last week, and, stuck at home, I was able to send them flowers by calling 1-800-Flowers. Beautiful big roses, they tell me. Of course,. I never saw or smelled them.

Little Caesar's has an Internet pizza site at http://www.onthego.com/little_caesars (they even have a virtual reality pizza you can assemble until the real one arrives). But Little Caesar has no outlets in the Twin Cities that can handle online orders. (Godfather's Pizza, at http://www.tgimaps.com/MPLS/GF/GF.html has online coupons for local outlets, but you have to call by telephone.)

But flowers and pizza [NOTE CHANGE FROM "FLOWERS AND FLOWERS" is like Koyaanisqaatsi, a diet out of balance. You can't stock your refrigerator via the Internet, as yet. But that will change, and when it does, everything will change. Can you imagine the shockwaves going through the corporate offices at places like Supervalu and Wal-Mart when an few enterprising outfits experience quick success selling groceries and hardware via the net?

The big packaged goods retailers are based entirely on the model of centralized consumer warehouses with parking lot. It is the exact opposite of cocooning: not only do you have to leave home to go there, but you bag your own purchases. They can't change their way of doing business overnight. And even if they could, they would still have to compete with the newcomers, who started with no fixed assets, whereas Wal-Mart has all those huge stores and parking lots to pay for.

Given the operational model of the big stores, cocooning will mean the end of the world. It will take us all off the streets and put us behind our electronic hearths. Outside, the only traffic will be fleet after fleet of delivery vans, bringing us all our food and work assignments, and off-duty delivery personnel, heading home to their hearths.

We will control all our input and output. There will be no chance occurrences. Street crime will be nil, but everyone will still stay home because all the TV shows will be about street crime. Our TVs will scare us into relying even more on TV. No helirockets, and no gyrocars. The most jarring intrusion of the day will be a wrong phone number.

Goodbye mall, goodbye sprawl. Hello ceiling, hello wall.

If I were an investing man, and convinced of the inevitability of a lot more cocooning, I'd invest in natural gas stocks -- a cheap, clean fuel source for truck fleets. And maybe a technology company like Bolt Beranek & Neuman, that makes the switching equipment whose sales will zoom when everyone starts buying milk and eggs over the Internet. And maybe a good sofa company, like Herman Miller.

Meantime, I have some ideas for a halfway solution to the problem of getting stuff. You can ride a bicycle when you need to get something. You can't fit ten sacks of groceries in the baskets, but you can get enough food for maybe a day for a family of four, if you shop carefully.

If you want to do it in style, you can hook up a virtual reality visor to your cycling helmet. Then, when you head off to Piggy Mart for groceries, you can program yourself to simulate a trip to the market in Paris, France.

You'll be out there in the actual world, with delivery vans speeding every which way around you, but you'll be free of fear, hearing the soft rolling sounds of a French accordion, and imagining yourself a kind of techno Jacques Brel.

Thus University Avenue becomes the Champs Elysees, and that Taystee Bread in the basket is the evening baguette.

Or, you can just use your imagination.

To Michael Finley's home page

Stimulate the economy, give a poet a dollar.