Chasing Down Time: Ten Sentence Story #115

Thomas had a colossal problem, which was that he had no idea why he was always running out of time to do all of the important things that he wanted to do in life.

It wasn’t as though he was so much of a time waster — after all, he only played a couple of hours of video games every day, not including the time that he spent playing games on his phone while taking the train or bus.

He read the free newspaper from cover to cover, skipping only over the sports section since that didn’t particularly interest him.

He would spend his lunch break watching downloaded television shows on his phone since he wanted to block out the sounds of his work environment and forget about all things related to work for a good forty-five minutes.

It wasn’t as though the farms and the cities that he tended online could go on without him — they clearly need him, and his friends relied on him to send them presents and to tend to their farms and frontiers and cities.

He would have surely set aside time when he got home to do the more important things but of course there were always dishes to be done and diapers to be changed and, of course, farms and frontiers and cities to tend.

He would look in awe as his friend Johann would spend his evenings getting drunk and eating deep fried chicken and still manage to achieve some of his greatest ambitions.

Johann said that it was because he spent more time off of the computer than on the computer, and it pushed Thomas to put away the games and the farms and the cities and the frontiers and to take out a notepad and a few never-fail gel ink pens.

All of a sudden, the time that he never had came sprouting forth from the cracks in the days where he had previously been mindlessly tending a digital landscape that never cared for him in return.

Stories were being written and a guitar was tuned and learned and exercise took place on a regular schedule — and Thomas eventually found balance and even managed to tend those silly farms and frontiers and cities in moderation.