On the curb in front of my apartment, I sat this morning, minding my business, with my headphones on, when from my left, a dude wearing a plastic helmet rolled past me on one of those motorized unicycles with no handles. How the hell was he able to balance himself going down the road on that thing? While I figured I would’ve eaten shit, somehow he stayed upright all the way down. That’s how I know that I’m stuck in the future, when I see those things, whatever they’re called. Maybe they just label them motorized unicycles because that’s what they are.

But yeah, here I am in the future. Thirty years ago, I never would’ve predicted civilians would be transporting themselves on things like that. They also get by on electric bikes, which I don’t understand the concept of. They’re somewhere in between a scooter and a regular bike. Are they for people who are too lazy to pedal a bicycle but not daring enough to ride at the speed of a scooter? Since I’ve never ridden one of them, and probably never will, I ask God why he has put pedals on an electric bike if no one has to use them.

There are also electric skateboards, which I understand. If I were to ride a skateboard, I wouldn’t want to propel it using my other foot. Instead, I would stand on it and have a motor propel me forward. A dude I see nearly every day, who’s about my age, maybe ten years younger, rides one. Whether he’s his son or a nephew, a boy who looks about seven years old rides it with him down my street. The boy hangs on to him by his leg. It’s absurdly dangerous, but he keeps on doing it. One of these days, the boy will fall off and injure himself badly, maybe even be maimed.

But it’s the future. There’s no present anymore. People aren’t satisfied with regular skateboards or regular bikes, etc. But the unicycle is a new one. Those were outmoded a hundred years ago, I thought, but somehow, they’ve made a comeback. Some weirdos ride along the sides of business streets on those things, sometimes without a helmet. And then teenagers ride those razor scooters that can speed up to twenty miles per hour, and they’re not wearing helmets either. It’s Mad Max world, which I’d never predicted would arrive in my lifetime.

The only thing I did predict when I was just a boy, around ten years old, was that everyone would get their own television channel. But I’m not completely accurate with that prediction because their channels aren’t yet streaming on TV services–but maybe they will at some point. There is such an invention as YouTube, where anyone can broadcast themselves. People make a living now, putting themselves on camera in their laptops and releasing episodes of them just looking at me and expressing their thoughts about anything. Some of these folks are actually entertaining me with their personalities, not all of them but some. How I didn’t predict the internet, just everyone having their own channel, I find it strange that I could predict one thing and not the other.

It’s hard to imagine what will come next as I use my phone to pay for coffee. People can now upload their driver’s licenses to their smartphones. How’s that going to work? Our social security cards are coming next. We’re slowly being sucked into our phones. Sooner or later, we’ll physically be trapped inside them. People will wonder what happened to Grandma Felicia. She’ll be stuck inside her phone with the rest of her information.