From the Present:

Do you know any ten-year-olds working as journalists? Exactly. So what gives? Why do newspapers hate ten-year-olds so much? Why won’t they hire them? Isn’t that racism?

Well it turns out, ten-year-olds don’t write very well. Add that to professional baseball, running corporations, going to war, doing complex calculus and curing cancer; and we begin to realize that ten-year-olds leave much to be desired.

This train of thought came about through going through my childhood journals for the posts on this website. Often times what is written leaves out a lot of stuff that in hindsight seem like pretty important details I didn’t feel were worth including.

As an example (based only loosely on an actual occurrence):

I wrote something like: Today I went to the fair.

But fail to mention that: Today at the fair one of the sad clowns too out a missile launcher and fired on the Ferris wheel causing wide spread panic and mayhem.

If you replace ” sad clown” with “me”, and replace “fair” with “indoor RV show”, and then replace “fired a missile launcher at the Ferris wheel” with “started the ignition of one of the RVs while revving the engine,” then this is completely true.

 Here’s another example.

From the Past: 

Jan. 3, 1996 – Age 10

I went over to my friend Matthew’s house. 

From the Present:

And could Shakespeare have expressed the visit to my friend Matthews house with such beautiful detail? (Yes, it does feel odd making fun of my ten-year-old self’s writing abilities).

But seriously, if I had to take on the role of parental interrogator with my self back then, I would have asked the following:

Luke, is that all you did at Matthew’s? Are you sure Matthew’s cat didn’t consume the hamster during that visit? Also, you didn’t feel it was important to write about the fact that Matthew’s mother was off her meds and kept running around the house insisting she was seeing apparitions from the The Virgin Mary?

Didn’t you think it was journal-worthy to have mentioned that the mother allowed us to go sledding off the second story roof into a pile of snow below and that one of Mathew’s sisters broke her arm?

I don’t think my vocabulary stretched far enough back then to be able to really express the insanity that was happening my friend Matthew’s house. But I  do remember I  left his house feeling fortunate that day. Because despite my mother’s growing religious fervor at this time, she was not insane. And that was something to be very, very thankful for.

Thank you, mom, for not being insane.

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