A Letter To My Future Children

Dear future children,

Hello, ___________, ______________, ______________ and _____________. *

If you are reading this than I have done a great job raising you, because according to current trends one of every ten of your classmates is illiterate, therefore I am pretty much the greatest father ever and deserve a silk-screen t-shirt in honor of the accolade. Unless I’m dead, in which case your mother or adoptive family did a decent job bringing you up and it wouldn’t kill you to say “thank you” now and then.

Now that I think of it, I hope I’m not dead when you read this letter. The intent is to capture a period of time in my life before you were born so you can see what I was like when I was younger. If I die this letter will be crazy sad like that movie My Life.

Either way, another year has trickled down the hourglass, time spent in free fall toward my inevitable station as a crotchety old man, landing me even further from the coveted 18-24 demographic I prefer to party with and see naked.

If any of you are daughters, please disregard the last paragraph and listen to me very carefully: If you have sex anytime before twenty-two years of age I swear to god, dead or alive, I will haunt you mercilessly. All guys are assholes and literally only want to get in your pants. There are no exceptions. Any attractive guy who says otherwise is trying to chink your arm and make you easier. Any unattractive guy who says otherwise is flat-out lying. Avoid them all until after college and then only date good men. They are hard to find but you will know them by how kindly they treat everyone they meet.

Alright... now I am officially questioning the possible posthumous delivery of this note. What feels organic and beautiful now could come across creepy and impossible like Back To The Future III when Marty receives that lost, yellowed letter from Doc Brown.

Nonetheless, getting older isn’t all bad. Thanks to life’s insidious unpredictability I am chock full of revelations regarding human behavior. However, being adept in anticipating reaction is an albatross unto itself as it begets a greater sensitivity to the untrue, the stupid and the wrong. I hope I have imparted upon you most of the lessons life taught me. I realize we learn best when suffering ourselves but if even one scar is avoided by my words it could mean the difference between a positive, adventurous life and a jaded, scared existence.

In other news, we currently have a black president of the United States, though by now you’ve probably had… well, you probably haven’t had another one but at least you weren’t subjected to the infantile political antics, the confusing and inconsistent braggadocio of supposed revolutionaries, or the barrage of blatant racism we have seen from every pore of media.

It is my sincere hope that as you read this I am still with your mother, happy and espoused so many years later, though the chances are slim and dwindling of me even being alive by then since I am currently single. Not to be morose but to error on the side of percentages.

Look at it this way: I am a spry thirty-one years of age. The average life expectancy for a male in the U.S. is 75.8 years. Not having taken great care of myself I must allow a ten year margin of error; removing the extreme leaves us at 65. If we include miscellaneous environmental factors (i.e. smoky bars and houses, stress from jobs/women) it would be safe to assume that I am halfway through my life. Since for whatever reason I envision you reading this as a fifteen-year-old I have roughly fifteen years left to get off my ass and knock your mother up.

Honestly though, it’s not a given that I know your mother well before you are conceived. Don’t get me wrong, I want to spend my life with a women who makes me happy... it just may be someone other than your mother. I am prone to haste, especially when affairs of the heart or genitals are concerned. All I’m saying is don’t mistake my intelligence for self-control. Even my rabid mysophobia couldn’t keep me from schtupping that stripper in the VIP room of the Kalamazoo Déjà vu. If you appreciate nothing else I’ve done for you, thank your stars she’s not the one spit you out.

There is so much more to say but I fear this letter already resembles a schizophrenic degenerate’s 2010 almanac. My purpose for writing this was so you would know that the old man hollering from the living room to turn your goddamned music down was at one time a young man who liked to play his music really loud. He did all the wild and crazy things kids do. In fact, he did them until his early thirties.

What I’m trying to say is that I understand what it’s like to be your age. I may not know how to use your newfangled technologies or slang, but for a brief period of history I was considered a cool dude. I know you’re going to make mistakes and I accept that, I just want to talk with you about them to be sure you’ve absorbed everything there was to learn from the situation. You are always welcome to kneel by my chair and chat. Or by my grave. You know, wherever I am at the time.

Sweet dreams, kid(s). The future is wide open. Let nothing hold you back. Live to dream. Impossible is nothing, and whatever else you hear in commercials. Simply disconnect the tagline from the product and apply it to your life.

My eternal love and many child support payments,



Atticus L. Winston


*(please fill empty spaces with “N/A”)