Yesterday, I got a wild hair you know where. And I know you know where.
That wild hair motivated me to do something I’ve been thinking about doing for more than a minute. I invited ChatGPT to play a game with me. A literary game.
If you know me like I know myself (and some of you do), you know I like literary games. And one of my favorite games is the exquisite corpse.
An exquisite corpse is a literary game invented by the surrealists in the early part of the 20th century. One player writes a part of a story, then another player comes along and picks up where the first leaves off. Another comes along behind that one and takes the story to the next level. And so on. This continues until all of the players have written a leg of a story. They may or may not start at the beginning and go another round.
The idea isn’t necessarily to produce a finished product. It’s simply to play a game, to use the collective imaginations of the participants to create something new. I wanted to do that with ChatGPT. So …
I sent an invitation. ChatGPT RSVP’d. And wrote the first leg.
Below is the first chapter of our exercise. Let me know if you think we should continue this experiment or abandon it now.
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ExQuisite Corpse … by ChatGPT and Me
In the town of Vanilla Spectacle, Tuesdays were reserved for interpretive sneezing. Mayor Crumbwell, a retired tap dancer with a peg leg made entirely of fax machines, blew the ceremonial foghorn precisely at 3:14 p.m. to signal the start of the sneeze parade. Children in paisley hats wheeled around mannequin torsos filled with taffy, while adults whispered conspiracy theories into jars of mayonnaise. Atop the First Universalist Spaghetti Temple, Sister Doris levitated slowly, assisted by helium hymnals and one extremely polite drone. Meanwhile, under a picnic table that hadn’t moved since Nixon, a sentient pair of Bermuda shorts whispered to a cockroach named Kenny, who was plotting to overthrow the Department of Elbow Licensing. No one noticed, except for a semi-sentient mop named Frances who had recently joined a support group for underappreciated cleaning supplies. Frances wasn’t nosy, per se—just emotionally porous. And allergic to parables, evidently.
Given that Frances only wanted to feel that sense of belonging she felt entitled to—based entirely and arbitrarily on her ability to wax a bald head at the speed of a rising contralto—she leaned into Kenny and shouted, “Wassup, McDaddy?”
The Bermuda shorts left the picnic in search of a pair of socks. Kenny just grinned and hid behind Mayor Crumbwell’s autistic niece, who bore the honor of blowing the first sneeze.
Pastor Bruce, whom no one can ever remember whether he goes by his first name or his last, stood and shouted at the top of his lungs, “Line ‘er up all ye scallions, time fer the big sneeze off!” Of course, that launched a county-wide stampede of hairy buggers and dainty dolls rushing to get their tickets and pay their entrance fees. Just like last year.
The sneeze off, as tradition dictated, would begin with the ceremonial anointing of the nostrils. Miss Velma, dressed as a Victorian neti pot, poured hibiscus-scented saline into the cavernous snouts of competitors while humming something suspiciously like La Cucaracha. Somewhere near the inflatable butter sculpture of Gorbachev, two men in tutus debated the ethics of artificial pollen.
Frances, still smarting from Kenny’s deflection, tied her apron like a noose and muttered, “I’ll show them waxing speed, alright.” She dug into her satchel and withdrew the Velvet Whisper™ turbo-polisher, which hadn’t been street-legal since the 2003 Cranial Shine Riots. The device thrummed with dangerous nostalgia.
Meanwhile, Mayor Crumbwell, entirely unaware that his niece was a ventriloquist’s dummy repurposed for therapy, clapped his hands and declared, “This year, no sneezing without proper form! Violators will be forced to juggle pickles in the Dunk Tank of Consequence.”
A hush fell. Then a sniffle.
Kenny, never one to let a party or parade go by without his inserting his presence at the most inopportune time, sprinted into the milieu, covered in ketchup and axel grease, screaming like a banshee (or so it seemed until, with no warning whatsoever, the words of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” fell out in a warm baritone). On that note, Pastor Bruce stopped what he was doing and joined in. Mayor Crumbwell cursed. Frances stiffened. And the Bermuda shorts returned with a slit in her rear, which caused Ol’ Nurse McGonagall, whom most people just call “Eileen”, to think they were really boxers.
All the girls giggled, and the boys practiced their sneezing until it became evident the neti pot was done with her humming.
But just as the final gurgle of the neti pot faded into a nasal silence so thick it could be sliced with an otoscope, the trombonist arrived.
No one had invited the trombonist.
Yet there he was: decked out in a tuxedo T-shirt, ski goggles, and mismatched crocs, dragging behind him a Radio Flyer wagon filled with pickles. Giant pickles. Mindful pickles, some claimed. One even had a monocle.
Without breaking stride, he let loose a foghorn blast that nearly decapitated Frances' composure. Kenny, never one to be outdone by brass or brine, drop-kicked a jar of mustard across the lawn, shouting, “THIS IS FOR THE GLORY OF THE GLANDS!”
And so began the sneeze-off’s opening act. Interpretive glandular warfare.
The children drew straws to see who would sneeze first. The Bermuda shorts wept. Pastor Bruce licked his lips like a man preparing to baptize a rodeo clown. Something wicked was about to spew.
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Thus ends the first chapter of our exquisite corpse titled “Taco Hut”. So far, ChatGPT and I have completed three chapters. Now the question for you is, does this story bear the telling? Should I continue this experiment, or are we done?
Comment below and let me know.
First published at Substack. Image by ChatGPT