Hogwash!

Okay.

I have a confession to make.

Sometimes, I use a topic generator.

Sometimes I get home and I'm so tired- on every level- that everything that comes out of my brain is complete hogwash. The only thoughts I can muster are grunts, and that's being generous. But I know if I don't write at least a little every night, I will be worthless at my craft by the time I actually have enough free time to practice it as I desire. On these nights, I turn to a topic generator for free writing. This stuff never gets published because it's usually, as I said before, hogwash.

Google seriously has an image for everything.

But sometimes, my topic generator seems as uninspired as me. Case in point:

"Write about yourself at 7."

Really.

Myself at seven. 

This isn't really something I would want to read about from anyone. No one was interesting at seven. Even child prodigies are not interesting at seven, because they're seven. All I even remember about being seven was reading, and some bully who liked to steal my books. I can't even really be sure that I existed in the typical sense of the word, because if I wasn't reading I was sleeping. 

More to the point though, the only thing you can really do with the malarkey that would come out of that free writing exercise is write a letter to yourself, and I just can't do that. Not only is it a cop-out for writer's block and a suck up to a culture of obsessing over yourself (for more on this you should read the awesome blog of Mitch Travis- HERE!), but they're inherently dishonest. You're presenting a romanticized version of yourself, and people buy it because they too are romanticizing themselves. 

That being said, I'm going to attempt this exercise out of the belief that one man's trash is another man's treasure, and that it takes one to know one, a bird in the hand yada yada yada. Here goes.

Dear Seven Year Old Me,

Since you're reading this, you have obviously come from an alternate dimension where you're way smarter than me and have mastered both time travel and dimension-jumping voodoo. Congratulations. Way to rub it in by stopping by my pathetic little blog and not even bothering to give me a "like" on Facebook. Jerk.

You are clearly just as egotistical as me, since you're reading your own blog. Jerk.

That little twerp who kicks you while you're reading has a really freakishly small head, and you are reading unusually large books. The pen is mightier than the sword, especially when used for bludgeoning.

Your handwriting sucks. This won't change. Could you consider becoming a doctor so that you have both an excuse for this nonsense and the money to make it irrelevant?

Thanks!

Jerk from the Future (Or present, really, since it definitely isn't me that is time traveling)