Writing exercise four: making fun of dead people

I can feel it, reader. Slowly but surely, my writing is improving. This is day four of "writing exercises week", and my fingers are tingling. Granted, I've only spent about 15% of each column actually performing the exercises, but still, I feel the tingling.

I also feel a similar tingling in my left leg, which leaves open the possibility that my fingers and leg are asleep. But let's just pretend it's talent flowing through my body.

Today's writing exercise teaches us to bombard ourselves with stupid questions. I could spend time complaining about how the beginning of the exercise explains how you "shouldn't focus on words" because they're stored in the left side of the brain, which is also where the "inner critic" resides. Or how the exercise suggests you use your "inner writer" (location not given) instead, and allow him/her/it to do the writing for you.

Ugh. Here's a direct quote from the exercise:

"So don't think! Thinking will take you into your left brain and the domain of the Inner Critic who might think this is a really dumb exercise and this person, Emily Hanlon, doesn't know what she's talking about and you'd do better by leaving this web site and cleaning the house."

Funny, that last sentence is what I was thinking even before I started the exercise. But instead of thinking about cleaning the house, I was thinking of taking a stale loaf of bread I found in my cupboard the other day and bringing it outside to see how high it would bounce if I chucked it down the street.

But let's get on to the exercise. I'll mark the questions in bold, and mark my answers in a fancy font style I save for special occasions, called "not bold".

Think of someone you really hate or strongly dislike, someone who drives you nuts:

I choose Orville Redenbacher. I think it's the bowtie. It could also be the emo glasses, though. What? He's dead? Well, I hope they cremated him and added him to his own sickening and horrendously overbuttered microwave popcorn. But to tell you the truth, I'm not surprised he's dead. In those popcorn commercials, he always looked like his skin and hair had been pasted on with glue.

If the person who's name you wrote down were an animal, what kind of animal would he or she be?

Orville would be a capybara, which is a four-foot, 100 lb. rodent commonly found in South America. The hides of capybaras are made into gloves, just like Orville's rubbery skin could have been. I'm not sure if capybaras eat popcorn, but then again, I don't think Orville ate his own popcorn, either. If he had, it probably wouldn't be so damn buttery. Bastard.

If the person were a color, what color would he or she be?

Finally, an exercise that makes racial profiling fun again. I'd classify Orville's color as "bleached honkey".

List as many adjectives as you can think of to describe this person. Don't worry if you put down nouns too. Just begin to list:

Transvestic. That's all. Just . . . transvestic.

If this person were an object in nature, what would he or she be? i.e., a tidal wave, a black rose... whatever:

A dandelion, after they turn into that fluffy white stuff. Couldn't you imagine walking up to Orville's hair, blowing on it, and watching it flitter away through the air, just like the dandelion fuzz? It would be scary too, because you'd have to live with the thought that you might have helped spread and plant Little Orvilles all around the area.

List some verbs to describe how the person moves:

Does rigor mortis count as a verb? Because it's hard to find verbs to describe the movements of dead people.

Give your person a new name:

Mister Penisfingers. I had a teacher in junior high school who all the students nicknamed "penis fingers", because he had huge Frankenstein-sized hands. Years later, we learned that the teacher had passed away, and even then, the "penis fingers" joke was still funny. "Hey, did ya hear? Old dick fingers finally kicked the bucket", we'd say. Talk about your timeless classic jokes.

I was also considering the names Poop Wilson, Feces McFadden, and Boob Party. The last one isn't really a name, but it sounds pretty cool.

Tomorrow's writing exercise: You didn't know there were writing exercises for creating erotic literature, did you? Ha! This will be fun.