Exercise - Imaginary Press Release

Learning more creative writing tools at a recent writer's workshop (perhaps more adaptable to poetry than technical papers) included efforts to bring smiles from my writing, it was suggested that I put the following on my blog. Background is that we had just experienced a meditation tool in which one imagines self inside a black box, which for me seemed to isolate me from the rest of the universe, just me and the black box. Then we were asked to write an imaginary Press Release in which oneself was the subject.

So here is what I wrote for that exercise, and reading it to the workshop group provided lots of mirth for everybody....

"Press Release -

Jim Cline went into an odd shaped black box and disappeared from the universe.

He was that older man who rode around on the buses from Sunland to Exposition Park 4 or 5 hours a day, carrying a backpack everywhere , worrying people with his oddities and lack of talking with people and looking wistfully at the cute young women; he clearly did not know his place.

He volunteered at the Natural History Museum 3 or 4 days a week, helping several marine biology research projects ongoing there.

Back in his tiny studio apartment in Sunland, he wrote endlessly on his computer and internet, raving on and on about how people could make this weird electric motor thing encircling the earth from ground up to GEO and that could enable constructions in GEO that could provide all the electric power the world needs, clean and free of the greenhouse gas problem, abundant energy for the whole world; ability to recycle toxic wastes back into their pure elements for re-use, and people could live in cities built up there in orbit, crazy things like that, raving on and on.

He made everyone feel uneasy with his strange ideas, and we can all breathe easier now that he is gone into that black box.

Another Press Release will be issued to warn you if he re-appears."