Still Hungry
A Tasty Tirade and a Silly Writing Prompt
Welcome back, dear readers. For this week’s workshop, the prompt is one that loosens us up and helps us to be more playful (writing is so serious sometimes, isn’t it?). The prompt is called, “Nonsensical Sentences.” For a more detailed description, see the step by step instructions below, followed by my own writing in response. At the end of the page, enjoy a great Margaret Atwood poem. (I always share a poem to close out the workshop.)
But first things first: as always, our workshop begins with a quote to set the tone. This week it’s Baudelaire.
Be Drunk
You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it—it's the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.
But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.
And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking. . . ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: "It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish."
Charles Baudelaire, 1821-1867, originally published in The Paris Spleen
Now, the prompt. To get drunk on words, we each write a series of sentences—as many as we can without thinking—that make no sense, that are absurd and nonsensical. One way to do this is to begin a sentence with a subject, as if it's going to be a normal sentence. For instance, "The opera singer is beautiful."
Then add a separate clause that makes it nonsensical:
"The opera singer is beautiful and mice comb their hair in the moonlight."
Then choose one and write in response. Here are a few that led to my piece below:
You're making the spaghetti and mudballs with rabbit fur sound worse than it really is.
Please make sure to turn off the dragons, flip on the lima beans, and strangle the green green lawn before slapping me goodnight.
Have some fun with this.
What I wrote is below.
Sometimes I don't want to eat quinoa or add tahini to my veggie bowl. And most nights I couldn't care less about marinating the tofu. And while I know that cheese is a no no when it comes to dysbiosis, sometimes the only thing I crave is a bright green piece of pizza, slathered in pesto, sloppy with melted mozzarella, and dotted with whole cloves of roasted garlic.
Remember to add avocado to your ground turkey, beet, and brown rice plate: it's the good kind of fat. But even with strings of turmeric stained sauerkraut, I still feel like something is missing. And it isn't a pickled anything: it's more like pumpkin pie and whipped cream. I'm tired of feeling like a cookie is a crime, or an ice cream is an addiction: I'll hobble around all week on inflamed tendons if I can just get a scoop of ultra-chocolate from the sweet young man at Double Rainbow on Castro Street, if I can speak a little Spanish with the woman who wears too much eyeliner at Toy Boat as she dumps another ball of butter pecan into my compostable cup.
"Call me when you're ready to party again," my brother texts on my stupid phone and I want to reply, "I want to party every day, but see, I've got this auto-immune thing that keeps me in the health food aisle.” A club soda with lime, and chickpea papadums with homemade hummus isn't what I'd call a party.
I recently bought a bottle of sparkling rosé for a party I was invited to on Friday night, and I felt like an addict stashing away his blow. I'm all tingly inside just thinking about drinking half a glass and eating a big fat square of my four ingredient maple- sweetened chocolate bark. Let the good times roll, honey. This is how I party now. This is how I go fucking crazy on you. This is the way food has become a bargaining chip, a pleathery pleasure, a Rubik’s cube. A puzzle of desire and obsession. A way out of this terrible discipline.
I Was Reading a Scientific Article
by Margaret Atwood
They have photographed the brain
and here is the picture, it is full of
branches as I always suspected,
each time you arrive the electricity
of seeing you is a huge
tree lumbering through my skull, the roots waving.
It is an earth, its fibres wrap
things buried, your forgotten words
are graved in my head, an intricate
red blue and pink prehensile chemistry
veined like a leaf
network, or is it a seascape
with corals and shining tentacles.
I touch you, I am created in you
somewhere as a complex
filament of light
You rest on me and my shoulder holds
your heavy unbelievable
skull, crowded with radiant
suns, a new planet, the people
submerged in you, a lost civilization
I can never excavate:
my hands trace the contours of a total
universe, its different
colours, flowers, its undiscovered
animals, violent or serene
its other air
its claws
its paradise rivers
from Selected Poems, 1987