Young to Old

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The secret to staying young is always telling the time by hours, minutes, and even seconds. Think about it. Give a child a digital watch and then ask them the time, what do they do? They tell you the hour, the minutes, and then the seconds as they tick by,

“…forty-three, forty-four, forty-five…”

Middle-aged people will sort of fudge the time a little by the minutes, or they round off, up or down it doesn’t matter. They see a clock with the time reading: 5:21, and without hesitating they say, “It’s five thirty.”

The old are more concerned about how long between naps or meals. You can ask an old man what time it is right now and he won’t tell you in any straight way. He might tell you what time he got up this morning: “Four A.M.” He might tell you when he had lunch: “I had a sandwich at ten.” He might even tell you how long it takes him to get up the stairs. “Yesterday it took me ten whole minutes, but today I couldn’t make it that fast. I think the top three stairs alone took me ten minutes. I need electric stairs.” I know a few oldsters who wouldn’t even talk about time if you brought up the subject. They’d talk about their time in the war, or tell you about their latest knee surgery.

“You wanna see the scar?”

Writing Prompts (update)

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I don’t usually enjoy retreading an archive post, but the prompts I threw together were rolling around in my cranial cavity. Playing with words is fun for me, so I couldn’t help but rework some of the previous notes.

The Metro.

A place? A person? A method of transport? Whichever gives the most positive vibes.

High school.

What they didn’t know was how high. It was high enough that if you failed you might fall, and if you fell, you might never come back. After anyone looked down from the edge, they decided failure was not an option.

Typewriter.

Which type? The lonely writer? The stuffy author? None of the above. The fortune cookie writer! “You have a magnetic personality.”

Clear tape.

Erase all evidence. Flee the vicinity. They know too much. The secret mission is no longer a secret.

Faith.

And charity.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

Want to do your own writing to the prompts? Here is a list of seventeen writing prompts. If the seventeen below aren’t enough for you, use the five above as well. When writing to a prompt, you can really do any kind of style you want. What does the prompt bring to your mind first? Do you instantly get a storyline in your head? Do you reminisce about something? Does the prompt throw you in a completely different direction? All of these are acceptable. Write whatever you want!

  1. Malt mash
  2. Razor burn
  3. Drive-in
  4. Frontal lobe
  5. Half staff
  6. Sexually healthy
  7. Gauntlet
  8. God’s gift to women
  9. Cat in the box
  10. Goat farm
  11. Chocolate covered
  12. Fat rat
  13. Perceptual sphere
  14. Anger issues
  15. Race track
  16. Plastic skeleton
  17. Right on

Writing Prompts

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The Metro.

Take it downtown. Take it uptown. Fall in love. Lose a love. Make new friendships. Lose friends.

High school.

Graduate. Matriculate. Make a date. Love and hate. Your homework’s late.

Typewriter.

Clickety-clack, DING! Hammering the letters onto the page like you really mean to make them stick. One-finger typing. Two-finger typing. Nine-finger typing. I don’t think anyone actually uses all ten fingers to type.

Clear tape.

Great for pranks. Sometimes, on certain surfaces, you really can’t see it. It’s invisible!

Faith.

There’s a certain philosophical flavor to the concept of faith. Without faith, the lion never leaps.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

Want to do your own writing to the prompts? Here is a list of seventeen writing prompts. If the seventeen below aren’t enough for you, use the five above as well. When writing to a prompt, you can really do any kind of style you want. What does the prompt bring to your mind first? Do you instantly get a storyline in your head? Do you reminisce about something? Does the prompt throw you in a completely different direction? All of these are acceptable. Write whatever you want!

  1. Malt mash
  2. Razor burn
  3. Drive-in
  4. Frontal lobe
  5. Half staff
  6. Sexually healthy
  7. Gauntlet
  8. God’s gift to women
  9. Cat in the box
  10. Goat farm
  11. Chocolate covered
  12. Fat rat
  13. Perceptual sphere
  14. Anger issues
  15. Race track
  16. Plastic skeleton
  17. Right on

Defense

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Filter for your thoughts? Filter for your mouth?

More important than a filter for your effluence is a wall in your brain. You need defense from the influence. You need something like a magnificent castle wall: something to help you be able to keep the fool ideas out.

It’s tough. There are so many, and they don’t come at you in single form, they come at you by the hundreds. Hundreds in a day will pass by your eyes, bomb blast your ears, infiltrate your brain, and contaminate your mind.

But they’ll only affect you if you let them, so keep your defenses up. They’ll attack you at every moment, especially when you have your guard down.

So the obvious question is, “How do I get a fancy defensive wall in my brain?”

Easy! Send cash to the address on your screen!

No, not really. I’m just messing with you.

There are ways to set up defense. Most of it has to do with being determined. Developing determination is done with pre-determination: Decide now, before the subject comes up. Sounds easy, right? Not super easy, because life is complex. There are so many subjects you might need to be determined about that you probably can’t decide on everything. A good general determination couldn’t hurt though.

For the sake of example, let’s say you’re interested in being healthy. Your ambition to stay healthy can be pronounced inside your head, “I refuse to do anything that will screw with my physical prowess.”

To make your determination more substantial, after you say, “I refuse to do anything that will screw with my physical prowess,” flex your biceps. It really works. It works even better if someone is watching. Truth!

Despite my funning on the subject of health, just think about it. If you had that determination not to “screw with” your “physical prowess,” could you be influenced to take up smoking? Not likely. Could anyone convince you to eat a boatload of junk food? Again, not likely. So there are two things you’re predetermined not to do, just from that one determined sentence. In fact, would you eventually start to understand that your physical prowess was dependent on exercise? Probably. You wouldn’t just be against things that would destroy your health, but you would be actively engaged in the promotion of health.

Not that I meant to go there in the first place, but it looks to me like a good defense enables a good offense. Whad’ya know?

T-E-Z-L-A

nightlight

Call me gullible, I bought a new Tesla, only the name was spelled T-E-Z-L-A.

The first thing I noticed was the signal light. I wanted to change lanes so I flipped the lever for the signal and the whole dashboard dimmed out. It was a lot like when you’re in your house during a rain storm and the lights flicker almost all the way off but not quite. There’s that moment of pause, no matter what you’re doing, when you look at the nearest light to you and for that split moment wonder, “Is the power going out?” Then the lights come back on and your brain decides, “Nope.”

I went through that whole routine, except I did it while driving. As soon as I was in the other lane, I flipped the blinker off and the dash lights came back on, so the whole thing lasted maybe a second. No big deal, I figured.

I was wrong.

The next time I noticed trouble with that fancy new electric car was when I tried to run the radio. Oh, the radio worked fine, but while it was turned on the car wouldn’t—couldn’t—go over 40 miles per hour. Like any smart monkey, I didn’t turn the radio off, I just smashed the pedal down to the floor harder. For some reason, pressing harder didn’t actually make the car go faster.

During the same trip, while I was getting yelled at by other drivers for going only 40 on the highway, I tried to signal a lane change with the radio on and the go pedal pressed down to the floor as hard as possible. The battery-level readout blinked off quickly and came back with the words: Never Surrender.

I’m still not sure if that was a message for me, or if the car was declaring its determination.

Either way, I decided then and there to give the car back to the dealership. When I got to a safe place, I pulled off the road and made some phone calls. These were unhappy customer complaint type phone calls. It ate up a lot of my precious time, but I finally got someone in the company to take me seriously. They agreed to check the car for defects with one condition: I had to bring it to them.

It was almost night. This was going to be a problem.

What I did next was neither safe or sane. I turned off every peripheral electronic function of the electric car so it wouldn’t waste energy. Then I threw out some of the dead weight as if I was in a ship on the ocean, sinking. I threw out the cup holders and the carpeting, the ashtray and the airbags, the rearview mirror and the back seat. There were big empty spaces everywhere when I was done. Once I was convinced everything unnecessary was out of the vehicle, I drove like a nitro racer back to the dealership.

Driving at night with the lights off and no radio, I got back there in under 5 minutes. I won’t tell you how fast I was going. I knew the car would never go that fast if the lights were lit.

It doesn’t need to be said, but I’ll say it anyway: I left that car there and I never went back.