PROMPT: Past Self

Daily writing prompt
If you had a time machine and could send just one message to your past self, what would it say?

“You’re living in a dream world, a simulation, nothing is real.”

Can’t really change anything (see: Novikov Self-Consistency Principle) and I don’t believe people can enact wisdom until they are ready (i.e. whispering wise words in the ear will not make a wiser person,) and so I’m left with fucking with ourself.

PROMPT: Future Self

Daily writing prompt
If your future self could send you one sentence, what do you hope it would say?

“Don’t worry, I’ll make sure we die in a reasonably robust mental and physical state.”

I don’t want my future self to get comfortable with the idea of pooping ourself in bed or forgetting the few people we know just because he’s gotten more cowardly about death in its proximity.

PROMPT: Advice

Daily writing prompt
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?

The best advice I ever got was, “Don’t give unsolicited advice!” It surprised me a little because I wasn’t even talking to the guy. A stranger just came up to me out of the blue and shouted it in my face… but it is wise advice.

Your Own Way

Wine & Song

PROMPT: Actually Kept?

Daily writing prompt
What’s a promise you made to yourself that you’ve actually kept?

I must say the “actually” in this prompt feels a bit accusatory and judgmental — as though, as a matter of practice, the answerer is generally unreliable. It also sounds like a question for someone with Dissociative Identity Disorder — otherwise who is making promises to whom? I am either one being or I contain multitudes, there being two seems at once too crowded and too lonely.

DAILY PHOTO: Closeups of Earth

Photograph of lesser smoothcap moss and prickly pear in Arabia Mountain Park of Stonecrest, DeKalb County, Georgia.
Photograph of Pineweed growing up through the cracks at Arabia Mountain Park in Stonecrest, DeKalb County, Georgia.
Photograph of pools in the granite at Arabia Mountain Park in Stonecrest, DeKalb County, Georgia.
Photograph of a long stemmed mushroom growing through the leaf litter in Stone Mountain Park.

Strange Planet

Relentless [Free Verse]