i asked my friends on facebook to provide me with a singular noun and then i would read the Wikipedia page, cut out an excerpt and then string them all together. This is a writing exercise (i may or may not have invented) that i have coined an Wikiwalk Exercise. The words used were pone, brain, phenotype, face, particle, elvis presley, pickle, tittie, human, dinosaur, doctor. I could not fit in verb, elvis presley or jamboree, but i tried.
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Walking is Good Exercise
His father correctly identified the bone as the lower extremity of the femur of a large animal, and recognized that it was too large to belong to any known species. He therefore concluded it to be the thigh bone of a giant human similar to those mentioned in the Bible.
What his father would say: ‘The whole schmear is greased within itself.’ Which is to say, everything is interconnected.
The young man saw chickens this way, how if you feed them their own eggs, they’ll learn to cannibalize their own. It revolted him to watch the birds pecking at the bones of their cousins when the slop was thrown to them. Chickens to bones to giants.
The femur was now hung over the mantle, having been unburied when the new septic tank was installed. It was cleaned and then bronzed and then labeled with something in Latin. The young man stared at the femur as he twisted the cap off a bottle of exorbitant cognac.
When drinking, he made swarms of connections like this, the result of long days squirreled up in his study. Randoms facts and figures began popping out at him in strange, uneven intervals, the minutiae unable to contain itself. Some of these conduits, he couldn’t begin to understand.
Brain tissue in its natural state is too soft to work with, but it can be hardened by immersion in alcohol or other fixatives, and then sliced apart for examination of the interior.
Perhaps this is why he drank. He poured himself a second snifter in the parlor, then staggered to the porch where he stared out over the plantation and sulked. He was trying to preserve his brain. And when his mind wasn’t plagued with trivia, perverse sexual thoughts fluttered in, one by one and he remembered that he was also subconsciously attempting to preserve his genes somehow, although the prospects weren’t promising.
He decided to head over to the country club, and while walking is good exercise, he opted to clumsily mount his Indian Scout motorcycle and sped off. And he thought about his genes and the genes of his father and he thought of breasts and he thought of young girls that presented their breasts at certain gentlemen’s clubs, just like one would lay out a still-life and he thought of the young Saint Agatha, who was tortured by having her breasts sliced off.
Saint Agatha is often depicted iconographically carrying her excised breasts on a platter. Agatha is also the patron saint of bell-founders because of the shape of her severed breasts, and also of bakers, whose loaves were blessed at her feast day. More recently, she has been venerated as patron saint of breast cancer patients.
The motorcycle angled through the amber autumn forest, gaining speed, the rider feathering the throttle. The frame shuddered and he with it and his teeth were grinding to a sludge. Where was he going with this? He felt his thoughts were almost attacking him. Then he remembered, humans are the only species able to ask questions. Unlike chimpanzees and bonobos, who are able to answer complex questions but can not formulate and ask questions themselves, humans ask questions from a very early age. He was somewhat greased within his own nature.
The road curved and he fell into a lower gear as he passed a sauerkraut factory. Perhaps hungry, he thought back to his grandmother’s kitchen cannery and how she taught him, in fermentation pickling, the food itself produces the preservation agent, typically by a process that produces lactic acid. Somehow, pickling, also known as corning, led to him thinking about President John F. Kennedy’s staffers, who despised Texan Vice-President Lyndon B. Johnson, used to refer to him behind his back as ‘Uncle Cornpone’ or ‘Rufus Cornpone’.
His thoughts returned to sex, jumped to genetic preservation and he shifted up: A beaver dam might be considered a phenotype of beaver genes, the same way beavers’ powerful incisor teeth are phenotype expressions of their genes.
He shook his head. The motorcycle whined. The drink whined in him. He was acutely aware that he was traveling at an incredible speed on machine that used small, controlled explosions to propel itself while balanced on two wheels. He was a comet, not really in control of his trajectory as much as gravity was in control of his. He thought:
Suspended solids may be held in a liquid, while solid or liquid particles suspended in a gas together form an aerosol. Particles may also be suspended in the form of atmospheric particulate matter, which may constitute air pollution. Larger particles can similarly form marine debris or space debris.
She rode a bicycle with a small basket filled with sketchbooks and he passed her on the road and he saw her face and thought he saw his long-dead fiancé and she smiled at him nervously in that split second before she was gone again and now his thoughts crashed all around him, falling like cylinders and he shuddered and tried to remind himself that it was alright.
The only issue was, certain areas of the brain respond particularly well to faces. The fusiform face area, within the fusiform gyrus, is activated by faces, and it is activated differently for shy and social people. He was essentially making improper associations.
And he dwelled on this thought as the bike buckled and spun and flipped out from underneath him and he slid down the knoll and rolled and caught rocks and his leg caught a tree with a cracking sound.
He lay there for a long while and the motorcycle engine hummed and sputtered and it was quiet. He lay there staring up into the sky through the sunkissed leaves and almost could feel the rotation of the earth and the roaring spin of the molten mantle beneath him and he thought about how his leg was most definitely broken, even if he hadn’t attempted to move it and he needed a doctor and that would make him a patient and this word patient is an ancient reminder of medical duty, as it originally meant ‘one who suffers’ and he lay there patiently
The girl from earlier soon rounded the corner, threw down the bicycle, books scattering and rushed to his side. She told him not to move and examined his leg. It resembled a snapped wishbone. The girl promised to return with help and stared into his eyes for a moment and then she was gone and he didn’t think of anything.