Living The Dream in 2026

This is a brief description. Also, this is a WIP that I'll be updating as I go. Nice.

1

I was at work — when I say “at work” what I really mean is at home in my dressing gown — and my USB mouse kept disconnecting, only I wasn’t touching it. It just kept disconnecting and then connecting again. It was annoying me, but I couldn’t be bothered to mute my laptop to stop the little noise it was making, so I went downstairs to take a break.

My thumbs were in pain from all the tippy-taps and mindless scrolling I’d been doing that morning, so I put my phone down, but after about seven seconds, I picked my phone up again and resumed the painful thumb movements.

I was hungry, so I went into the kitchen and started going through the cupboards as if I was a scavenger scavenging. Here is what I ate: three cherry tomatoes, some olives, a square of chocolate, and a bit of cheese. Then I filled up the kettle and put it on to make some coffee. While the kettle was heating up, I made some toast. I buttered the toast and then mixed some hummus and Dijon mustard together and spread that over the toast. I cracked a bit of black pepper over the hummus, then whacked a few slices of ham on top. It was a spur of the moment, made-up recipe, but it tasted really really good. After the toast, I ate some beef flavoured crisps, and finished off making coffee. I went into the living room to sit and drink my coffee and that was when my stomach turned, and I felt sick. I didn’t think anything of it, though, because it’s pretty normal to feel sick after a good scavenge.

There was pressure building up inside my head, as I sat there thinking about all the messages to which I should probably reply, but none of the messages were “a matter of life and death” messages, so I let the pressure build and decided to pretend it wasn’t there. The caffeine didn’t help the pressure. In fact, it made it worse, but there wasn’t much to do anyway, so I drank my coffee and contemplated making another one.

At this point in the story, something interesting needed to happen — you know, in an out-of-the-blue kind of way — in order for it to qualify as a well-written story and hit a story beat, or something. But this is a story about life, and life doesn’t adhere to story beats. Life just happens and keeps on happening until it doesn’t happen anymore, I think.

Anyway, I remembered that I was “at work”, and I went upstairs to check on the state of my mouse, which was ok again and had ceased its incessant connecting and disconnecting palaver. My colleagues were happily chatting away in the group-chat-thing, and I contributed with a few “thumbs ups” to make it look like I was a valuable member of the team. I was a very good collaborator. Nobody could take that away from me.

It was a Friday. Friday is a weird word. Say Friday thirty times in a row and just try to deny that Friday is a really wacky word.

2

Anyone reading this might be confused as to why the narrator finds the word Friday strange, but all will be explained in due course, my friend. The course “due” being the continuation of the story, see.

So there I was on a Friday afternoon, minding my business, which didn’t consist of much business at all, really, waiting for the work day to end, hoping nobody got any ideas involving me and work over the next few hours. It wasn’t a day for new opportunities. It was a day that screamed — just like every other day, to be fair — “leave Leo alone, please.” “He’s tired.”

I was always tired. I wasn’t sure if it was because of where I grew up, or a result of my current lifestyle, or if I was sick and dying. All three ideas spun on a constant loop inside my head most days. Being human wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, and they did some seriously good cracking. It was cracked very well. “Go be a human,” they said. “It’ll be great.” And, I suppose, it was great sometimes, other times not so much.

3