Today’s writing prompt comes from WritingLesson.com.

How wide is your generation gap?  Write about something you used to do during summer that kids today–for better or for worse–probably don’t do anymore.

There are plenty of things I could say about my childhood summers: playing hacky sack, riding scooters, doing copious amounts of narcotics, wearing jelly bracelets, and so on.  The thing is, I rarely did any of those things, and at least one of the items on that list is totally false (it’s hacky sack).  I was a pretty inactive kid, is what I’m trying to say.  I played a lot of video games, rode my bike a lot, and loitered at parks – things I am confident kids still do today.

But there is one thing I used to do as a kid with my friends: make stupid home movies.  When I say stupid, I say it with all the love a boy who ran into stop signs for the camera can mentally comprehend.  See, we used to make videos something akin to Jackass.  That’s a pretty bad description, though, considering none of us actually wanted to die.  Our stunts usually involved jumping out of trees, jumping into bushes, jumping off pool decks… you know… it was a lot of jumping, actually (damn it, I knew I should have done parkour).

When it rained, or when we didn’t feel like damaging our obviously far too influential brains, we would attempt to make short movies that actually had plot or, at the very least, some planned dialogue and props.  We once made a black and white film about a goblin trying to steal a banana from a secret agent.  Just look at that description and tell me that wouldn’t win some French film competition.

Now, I’m plenty aware that people, especially kids, make stupid videos all the time.  And I know that thanks to one website: YouTube.  There’s the generation gap this writing prompt called for.  We weren’t planning on uploading our videos to the internet in hopes of getting enough views for Disney to pick up our channel and offer us a television deal; we made stupid movies because we thought they were awesome.

I don’t know many young kids (ha! take that, government watch list!), but I can’t imagine a world in which YouTube exists where stupid videos stay trapped on the tapes lodged in some 13-year-old’s discount video camera.  I mean, hell, we probably would have uploaded them to the internet, too, if YouTube was around.