Random Ramblings

A task (used with students):

Go to the following website, and gather a random list of words from common to uncommon nouns to prepositions.

http://watchout4snakes.com/creativitytools/RandomWord/RandomWordPlus.aspx


Here is my list:

Chuck Identical Gulf Load Under Help Less Amidst Bravo Livid Cunningly ploy Cinch Implicated Skinned Trillion Mask Unscrupulous Sounded Compromise Pop Hence Until Thwart Breakfast

Now, write a story using ALL of these words, to form a fluent and sophisticated (I like to think!) piece of prose. That will one day become a best selling novel. Or at least a short story I can make a few hundred dollars off. Or just praise and acclaim from nearest and dearest :-)

Here we go:

Chuck was helpless. He stood, petrified marble, amidst the haughty conceit of the less-than-average street thugs, so used to being implicated their demeanour was identical - an orchestrated nonchalance that had seen them get off a trillion times before. Bravo! Chuck half whispered under the terrifying spotlights. This should be a cinch for you! Such a gulf between the brute with Diesel threads, faded in a way only three hundred dollar jeans could be, and the fraying ends of pants that had seen a decade since they were rescued from a load of cast offs in a community seconds shop – before being passed from his father to Chuck.


Wrong place, wrong time? Like all the other times and places?


Sticks and Stones will break your bones, kiddo.

No. This was just the wrong school.

The principal’s face was smooth under a mask of congeniality, a ploy cunningly contrived to thwart their rational insecurity. He would lull them, until, with a pop the terrifying head of the raging beast would emerge. It was Chuck’s derelict word against the full-fee paying toffs of the inner east. Innocence buffeted within his skull, protests which sounded but could not be realised. There would be no compromise: Chuck would either admit, or condemn; lie, or be killed. He’d never even taken so much as an overdose in Panadol, and yet now his locker was full of drugs. About to be given marching orders from the only school in Melbourne that would take him.

Hence, Chuck was well and truly skinned.

*

The gavel swung down with a momentous thud. Self Defence. The judge ruled. The alleged victim was truly the perpetrator of this malicious act; the alleged accused actually a hapless casualty of his environment.

A long sigh of relief was omitted from the gallery as judgement day was realised to be not so bad, after all. Justice was served! Pizza for the jury! And ten million dollars in compensation for every year of time already served.

In reality, what was got was a new blazer a livid shade of red and a train ride to school that seemed to take barely half as long as the school day itself. Kicked out of one school only to be fed to another and with little time for breakfast. Waiting outside the gates like a Roman ruffian knowing he would be fed to the lions just inside the colosseum. Life is unscrupulous, Chuck thought as reality hit him with the full force of a tonne of brick shithouses. If life handed you lemons you couldn’t always make lemonade.


Sometimes, you were just fucked.