What’s something you’ve done that your past self would be proud of?
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Still be alive? I don’t know. The little shit was underawed by virtue of great expectations.
PROMPT: Past Self
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Tag Archives: past
PROMPT: 20-year-old
Daily writing prompt
What is something you wish you could tell your 20-year-old self?
I’d probably tell myself to take a different undergrad major (I did 4 years of military before college, so it would still be relevant.) That said, I don’t know that my 20-year-old self would listen to me any more than he did to anyone else.
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PROMPT: Patriotic
I am. I wish my country the best, am pained to see ailments of what have always been the country’s greatest strengths (the government being limited and at the command of the people and the law [rather than the other way around] and the courage to boldly lead by building the new technologies and adapting to the world that came to be,) and will not stop bitching about it unless and until the situation rights itself. When I was a young man, I served in the military and waved flags. Now, as an old man, I’m not eager to see America go gently into that good night.
I realize that may sound excessively Pollyanna about America’s past and pessimistic about the present / future. I do realize that the country has always had its flaws, as humanity always does. (And loved it all the same.) There have been missteps and mass movements that would later come to be viewed as wrongheaded and self-defeating. But we always had checks and balances, an Enlightenment norm for tolerance, and a respect for decorum and gravitas in our leaders. Now, as I see the “Putin-Orban Manual for New Populist-Nationalist Dictators” being played out, I wonder if the shark hasn’t been jumped on all that was good, honorable, and impressive in the America in which I grew up.
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PROMPT: The Future or the Past
Daily writing prompt
Do you spend more time thinking about the future or the past? Why?
How would I know? When I’m doing either – by definition – my mind is wandering. Ergo, I have no metacognitive engagement. (i.e. I’m not timing or encoding— and certainly not recording— mental objects.)
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PROMPT: Nostalgic
Reminders of my time in the military, particularly an overseas tour in England.
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“The Past” by Ralph Waldo Emerson [w/ Audio]
The debt is paid,
The verdict said,
The Furies laid,
The plague is stayed,
All fortunes made;
Turn the key and bolt the door,
Sweet is death forevermore.
Nor haughty hope, nor swart chagrin,
Nor murdering hate, can enter in.
All is now secure and fast;
Not the gods can shake the Past;
Flies-to the adamantine door
Bolted down forevermore.
None can re-enter there, --
No thief so politic,
No Satan with a royal trick
Steal in by window, chink, or hole,
To bind or unbind, add what lacked,
Insert a leaf, or forge a name,
New-face or finish what is packed,
Alter or mend eternal Fact.
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PROMPT: Future Past
Do you spend more time thinking about the future or the past? Why?
I spend the most time trying to figure out how to live mostly in the present. The past is dead and the future is unknowable, so I might as well settle into this moment.
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PROMPT: Nostalgic
What makes you feel nostalgic?
In order of frequency: 1.) music; 2.) some random memory; 3.) a pattern of colors.
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Rampart Perspective [Common Meter]
From atop an old stone rampart, one's head within the clouds, one expects to see an old oxcart through that foggy shroud. But down below, the modern day: buses, cafes, and cars. I turn my head the other way, and the world 's as it was: Back in the times when that fortress was besieged and battered, and nothing moved freely but for a flag -- singed and tattered. There's a certain romantic view of long-gone days of old, but I think I'll be heading down before I catch a cold.
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POEM: Time’s Arrow
Precognition?
I barely have post-cognition —
which is to say, memory.
I have memories of memories of a world that never was.
Cobbled together hopes, dreams, and fears made into a montage of me.
One could chip away at what never was, but I’m not sure reality could support it’s own weight.
What was might end up a toxic rubble, steaming away into nothingness.
