What would I do with myself if I were living like three hundred years ago? Or even farther back in the past, four hundred, five hundred, ten thousand years ago? I simply can’t imagine a whole life where everyday goes by and there’s absolutely nothing to do. I’m picturing myself getting up in the morning. And then I’d have to go to the bathroom, but it’s hundreds of years ago, so there aren’t any real bathrooms, or toilet paper, and so I have to find some leaves, but knowing my luck there will only be poison ivy. But of course I don’t know the difference, and even if I wanted to learn, it’s not like the Boy Scouts have been invented yet, so who would I ask? Who else knows that type of stuff? So I’m all itchy and I can’t even take a shower, because maybe it’s winter, and there’s a good chance that I’ll freeze to death if I get wet. And showers don’t exist yet either. I mean, there’s probably some natural showers, like a nice not-too-big waterfall or something. But it’s probably freezing.

And the food’s got to be totally boring. No ketchup. No hot sauce. Where do you get salt from? There’s just gruel. Disgusting, boring porridges and basic sustenance. And then once you’re done with breakfast, what, go to work? Are there any jobs really? It’s probably just a whole life’s career making sure you can get enough gruel to make it to the next day. I’m guessing that means farming, or hunting, or stealing and running. So you go out and farm or whatever. And then you come back, another boring meal. And then what? Are you supposed to just sit around until the next day? I’m getting really bored just writing this out, imagining life, day in and day out, no TV, no Internet, no Taco Bell. No wonder humans have spent the majority of their time fighting. It’s at least slightly more entertaining than just sitting around. And I doubt there were even any good chairs, probably just a bunch of uncomfortable rocks, or a log that used to be kind of comfortable, but that was only for a year or so, before it started to get all rotten and bug infested.

If it’s winter, you’ve got to be miserable the whole time, nobody’s invented heat, nobody’s invented Gortex jackets, or those little warmies that you stuff into your pockets and boots on ski trips, you know, those little pouches that stay really hot for like seven hours. And then getting a drink of water must be the worst, all full of stuff, germs and dirt floating around in it, just like when Michael J. Fox went all the way back to the Wild West, and he asked for a drink of water, and it was brown. And that wasn’t even winter. Where do you get your water from if it’s a hundred years ago and it’s freezing? Everything’s frozen. Do you have to plan out your drinks like hours in advance, so you have enough time to defrost the ice?

I always think that it would be cool to be able to go back in time and just wow everyone with my knowledge of the future and my cool gadgetry that I’ve brought back with me. But it would get old pretty fast and I’d wind up really bored, again. I would need some sort of a wireless device that’s at least able to connect to the Internet in the future. Now that would be pretty cool. I could go on Youtube while everyone else is just sitting around looking at rocks or doing whatever it is they did for entertainment back then, like torturing smaller weaker people or punching each other in the face until one person gets knocked out. But what if some of the more intelligent people hear me always looking at my iPhone and laughing to myself, and they catch on to what I’m doing and insist that I share my futuristic technology? They’ll demand that I give it up and, despite my protests about continuity and the space-time continuum, they’ll insist, and they’ll enlist the help of some of the bigger past-people, and they might tear the technology right out of my hands. And I’ll scream, “No! You’re going to break it! You don’t know how to use it!” and they’ll say, “Shut up! What do you think just because you were born later that you’re smarter than us?” but that’ll definitely be the case. They won’t understand touch-screen technology at all, so they’ll just be holding my devices, my iPhone, my Game Boy, shaking them violently, getting frustrated that they can’t pull up videos or play games, totally not getting what they’re supposed to be doing, and it’ll all eventually break.

And they’ll turn to me and accuse me of sabotage. And I’ll have regretted coming back there in the first place, because now I’ll be stuck in the past, because they’ll have ruined my devices, my only methods of keeping in contact with the future, my only means of signaling to my crew that I’m ready to come home. It was probably a little shortsighted of me, not realizing that my phone would have eventually run out of power, and even though I brought several chargers, it’s not like there are any wall outlets that I could use to charge them up. I could try writing a message and leaving it somewhere that will eventually get discovered by archeologists in the future, hoping that whoever finds my note will deliver it to the proper time and place, to my colleagues, alerting them that these past-morons broke my technology, but how will I know where to put the message? And I’ll leave some clues here and some messages there, but nothing works, they must not make it all the way to the present day. It’s really hard to communicate any message even just a little further in the future. I’m just thinking about all the stuff I’m writing right now, and how it barely makes it to the afternoon, let alone a generation or two from now. I shouldn’t discount myself like that. Who knows? Maybe these texts will find their way down to our ancestors. If you’re reading this, ancestors, please come to the past and let me know. I promise I won’t use any knowledge of the future to alter the timeline. Please, I know what you’re thinking, that it must be really boring here in 2012, but it’s not. It’s not boring at all. I have XBOX. I’ll show you my iPhone. Come on, please! We can go get pizza! Think about all the fun we’ll have here. Did you see Batman yet? We can see Batman! Please visit me from the future! Please!