Saturday, April 2, 2016

Georgia Nutts Guild exercise for 04.02.16: Word mapping

So, mapping out words associated with the keyword, "Saline" produced the source for this paragraph:

    Dry eyes blinked outward, again and again, seeking to fend off the inward push of morning in the desert.  The air was crisp and arid like old paper; the sun, already blazing even from its low station close to the horizon.  Anywhere else on earth, this would be a midsummer's midday, not the early stretch just after dawn.  The breeze, as it fled, still carried with it a trace of the nightly chill bestowed to these barren sands but that was rapidly disappearing along with the encroachment of the heat of the day.  "Get the hell out of Dodge," he thought silently, blinking again.  Where he had heard it, he couldn't quite remember.  Then, almost as a kind of ritual, he mumbled it again out loud, just enough for himself to hear, not that there was anyone within a hundred miles to overhear it anyway.  "Get the hell out of Dodge."  It slid out with a certain slimy, scaly menace and he instantly regretted having said it openly.  He turned his back on the sun, his shadow drawing out from his feet to an outlandish length along the glowing ripples of sand.  "Where am I?" he wondered, "Arizona?" He stared down the length of his shadow towards the western horizon.  "Is Dodge in Arizona?" he queried idly, somehow finding it an unlikely possibility.  A ball of tumbleweed blew past in the retreating breeze, bouncing along the tiny dunes of the could-be-Arizona desert.  It seemed, in its lazy lope forward, to have more direction and purpose than himself, which he accepted with a slight sense of chagrin.  He sucked his teeth and kicked up a small cloud of dust with his left shoe.  "Hmm," he thought, staring down at his foot.  It still held the guilty residue of dust left from kicking the sand.  It was a sneaker he was wearing.  Not necessarily the first choice for trodding along on a trip in the desert.   He also noticed, now with additional chagrin that his two shoes were mismatched.  The left foot was wearing what looked like a cross-trainer, charcoal grey and orange, the right foot was clad in an old-school canvas Converse, flat-foot style and off-white.  He sucked his teeth again, rolling his tongue around inside his mouth.  Gazing westbound, he could see a line of low slung mountains gracing the distant edge of the earth, purple at their feet, their crests just beginning to take on the fiery glow of the sun's rays.  "What lies beyond those hills", he pondered.  Maybe Las Vegas, or even Los Angeles.  Well, he couldn't stand out here forever, that much was certain; he would have to pick a direction and get to stepping, mismatched shoes and all.  No highway or any man made artifacts were obvious anywhere in sight.  He sighed, turning again to look eastward toward the ascending solar disk.  It was already making his face and body hot.  He sighed, twice.  "Okay", he questioned, not sure if he could provide himself any suitable answer, "Which way?"

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