brain exercises

I've been having a tough time at work this week, so I did a few little "random word" exercises to loosen up over lunch. Yes, playing with words and being creative is actually more helpful than say, stepping away from the computer, as sad as that may seem. For the uninitiated, I try to string together five words picked at random from the dictionary into a mini-story. So here's the fruit of today's calisthenics:

ochre / soundman / constitutional / huddle / leafage

The policy makers and national leaders converged on the upscale secluded retreat for a series of scheming thinly disguised as constitutional debate. They huddled in small groups in the mansion’s many rooms, hatching plans and conspiring against the other liberal cliques and conservative factions, oblivious to everything around them, as the surrounding thicket’s leafage burst into autumnal colour, from the mildest ochre to the deepest red, and as an undercover CBC soundman, posing as a humble, tuxedoed waiter, recorded every word that was uttered.

crossbreed / hulk / jurisdiction / pistol / sliver

The hulk of a man pounced on him and they tumbled to the ground. The youngster
quickly realized he would be on the losing end of this particular fight. He regained a sliver of hope when he managed to free his right arm and quickly drew his 9mm semi-automatic pistol. Startled, the big guy rolled off him and stood up, unsure how to restore the balance of power that had just tipped in his disfavour. He wasn’t in his jurisdiction anymore; in fact, he’d been stripped of his turf for introducing a new crossbred variety of weed that enhanced both the buzz and the ensuing physical addiction; its popularity left all other suppliers in the dust, and even a couple of dealers of the harder shit complained. He’d always been radical, even among the ranks of organized crime. And now, he’d made a lot of people real angry.

bureaucratic / cattle call / converse / mellow / pen

It was a cattle call, to put it mildly. Anyone and everyone who had ever even given a thought to acting were lined up, in the hopes of being the next big thing. People conversed uneasily in line, wondering if the person before them would rob them of their dream. The closer you got to the front of the line, the more palpable the tension became; the bureaucratic system set up to register the auditioning slowed things to a crawl, and generally just made things worse. But there she stood, calm, mellow even, almost in a trance, in the midst of increasingly jittery blondes, fake and real; someone had finally penned the screenplay for Anna Nicole Smoth’s biopic and, damnit, that role was hers.

busybody / Dictaphone / Samoyed / twenty / instinctive

She had always been on the go, barely even slowing down to sleep; meals were always consumed while doing something else. She had also always been a busybody, and half the things she did in a day weren’t hers to handle to begin with. But she would never admit to such an outrageous claim; she simply did what needed to be done for the good of the company. That she was slowly killing herself in the process was irrelevant. That she needed to keep a digital Dictaphone handy to keep track of her endless to-do lists was merely a fact of life. That, some twenty years on, she would adopt a Samoyed from the local pound was an aberration, unless one considers how his deep instinctive drive to run and pull and herd perfectly matched her own.

Wednesday in six: Walked twelve point three kilometres today.

Thursday: Translating without understanding is utterly painful.

(600)