{"id":1160,"date":"2015-01-27T19:21:25","date_gmt":"2015-01-28T03:21:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/?p=1160"},"modified":"2015-05-09T19:22:32","modified_gmt":"2015-05-10T02:22:32","slug":"this-is-a-prompt-i-dont-want-to-follow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/2015\/01\/27\/this-is-a-prompt-i-dont-want-to-follow\/","title":{"rendered":"This Is a Prompt I Don\u2019t Want to Follow"},"content":{"rendered":"

Postaday for January 27th: Embrace the Ick<\/a>.\u00a0<\/strong>Think of something that truly repulses you. Hold that thought until your skin squirms. Now, write a glowing puff piece about its amazing merits.<\/em><\/p>\n

Well, no, I\u2019m not going to do this one. I\u2019m not going to respond to this prompt. The first thing that came to mind was some kind of worm thing I saw on a brief video. Some sort of deep-sea worm, although it was being held in a person\u2019s hand, so I don\u2019t know how it was still even alive. It squirmed around a bit, you know, the way big fat pink worms with pointy orange heads do, sightless and shiny. And then it seemed to spit out this white fluid that spread and branched like fast-growing roots, instantly coating the hand of the person holding the worm,.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no way I\u2019m going to \u201chold that thought until my skin squirms.\u201d That\u2019s not happening today. Do you even know how the brain works? We see things, and they enter short-term memory. Later, they enter long-term memory by way of dreaming. That\u2019s what dreams are: cognitive interpretations of our brains\u2019 making novel connections between recent sensory input and already stored memory. That novelty is our organization and retrieval system. For all I know my brain will arbitrarily associate this spit-worm\u2019s branching proboscis fluid with, I don\u2019t know, a bike ride through Stanley park, and every time I think about Canada, I\u2019ll get queasy. No thank you.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s all I need, having a dream in a few days where I\u2019m sitting in front of my computer, pounding out my 32nd blog post in five days, fingers numb until they elongate, branch out to cover all of the keys, and then intertwine with them while I try to describe the four-person bike I road though North Vancouver on a warm day in 2005. The shade-dappled asphalt, the smell of the sea and garlic fries from the kiosk where we stopped for a snack, that fat worm wriggling around with one pink end wrapped around the guy\u2019s ring finger and the other end slowly opening at the end of a brief reverse-peristalsis shudder and a phlegmy ejaculate groping, reaching for prey.<\/p>\n

To think that the same evolution, over 2 billion years, led to my brain and its ability to see, absorb, memorize and use a thousand different disparate facts a day, led as well as this deep-see worm\u2019s ability to see, sense, pursue and capture microscopic plankton to sustain itself for the sake of survival and reproduction. It\u2019s incredible. It\u2019s disgusting. I want no part of it. Count me out.<\/p>\n

Nor will I write about spiders, the smell of freshly cut mangoes, the Republican party, or a crazy person\u2019s toenail collection. Not going to happen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Postaday for January 27th: Embrace the Ick.\u00a0Think of something that truly repulses you. Hold that thought until your skin squirms. Now, write a glowing puff piece about its amazing merits. Well, no, I\u2019m not going to do this one. I\u2019m not going to respond to this prompt. The first thing that came to mind was … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “This Is a Prompt I Don\u2019t Want to Follow”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[61],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1160","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-postaday"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p24y52-iI","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1160","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1160"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1160\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1161,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1160\/revisions\/1161"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}