Writing Exercises

Using the spell-check for a little book I made in Blurb/Booksmart, I was charmed by the contrary choices it gave me—almost willfully obtuse at times; at others playful; at others trying to rewrite history.

For pinenuts, "did you mean pimientos?"
For 16th, "did you mean Utah?"
For chapati, "did you mean chaplain?"
For cowsmilk, "did you mean cornsilk?"
For Bonnard, "did you mean bombard?"
For Vivaldi, "did you mean invalid?"
For palazzo, "did you mean Paleozoic?"
For raddicchio, "did you mean addiction?"
For operahouse, "did you mean powerhouse?"
For Uffizi, "did you mean fizzier?"
For Tuscan, "did you mean Toucan?"
For Gloucester, "did you mean Leicester?"
For t'amo, "did you mean Tao?"
For più, "did you mean ICU?"

There's surely a writing exercise in that.

And another: Describe what you would like to be for Halloween.

I'm thinking a medieval mystic, a Black Mountain poet, a torch singer, someone who keeps bees in blue boxes in the mountains above Delphi. But then, above all else I want to be the woman who got on Caltrain in South City—probably not as much as twenty, wearing short black leather jacket, black boots, heavy canvasy pants with big pockets at the knees, some kind of cargo pants or riding pants. Black hair in dreadlocks past her waist. Not a big woman, but with enormous hands, like a man's, someone who could coax a basketball through a far hoop with a whisper, hands shaped to the ball, someone with absolute assurance. And yet a very feminine woman, for that. Her knuckles plated, crusted in silver, in rings, like gloves of silver or chain mail. An East Bay sorceress, inner city Medea, like the play we have just seen. I want for one changed night to be this woman, utterly unknown to myself.