Making Strange/Deranged Experiments
from RUN! a Deranged Experiment
I want to think about the topic of injuries in running. This is difficult for me because becoming so injured that I cannot run is a big fear of mine. I don’t want to think about it, let alone write about it. To make it a little more fun, I decided to make injury strange, to derange it. Maybe it will lose some of its power over me then? This deranged experiment is a strange hybrid of two items on the Please Add to the List list:
- Systematically derange the language: write a work consisting only of prepositional phrases, or, add a gerund to every line of an already existing work (9).
- Get a group or words, either randomly selected or thought up, then form these words (only) into a piece of writing—whatever the words allow. Let them demand their own form, or, use some words in a predetermined way. Design words (9).
I decided to take the first word of the medical term for runner’s knee, Patellofemoral (full name: Patellofemoral Pain Syndrome), and rearrange the letters into a phrase. This was fun and difficult. As a kid I loved taking a big word and then making as many different words out of it as possible. At first I did this here too. After finding about 50 words I decided that that approach was too easy. Why not make it harder. Ha! So, I limited myself more: I had to create a phrase using all of the letters. It took around a dozen attempts. Here are few of the anagrams that I was able to create:
PATELLOFEMORAL Pain Syndrome
- For All Leap To Me Pain Syndrome
- Melt A Paler Foot Pain Syndrome
- Alter All of Poem Pain Syndrome
- Mortal Foe Lapel Pain Syndrome
- Ol’ Temporal Leaf Pain Syndrome
- O Moral Leap Felt! Pain Syndrome
- Tell of Moral Pea Pain Syndrome
- A Feral Poem Toll Pain Syndrome
- Trope of All Male Pain Syndrome
For the record, I don’t think I’ve ever had runner’s knee. I picked it because the word was so long and medical sounding. I thought it would be fun to derange.
Experiment Two
I was so inspired by the first experiment of making strange/deranged, that I did another one. I let my mind wander through rhyme, trying to get as far from the thought/worry that started my thinking: an aching hamstring. This experiment came to me suddenly, while walking my dog around the neighborhood. I recorded a few lines into my voice memo app and then typed them up, along with others, some that I remembered from the walk, others that I created sitting at the dining room table.
Aching Hamstring
a hamstring
a bee sting
a gold ring
a bell rung
a purple tongue
a choir sung
a bird that sings
a phone that rings
a sweater that clings
a streetcar that clangs
a wolf with big fangs
a hunger that pangs
a heart that aches
a glass that breaks
a baker who bakes
a chef who cooks
a watcher who looks
a shelf with no books
a shelf on the wall
that’s ready to fall
a great big red ball
an informal dance
a night of romance
a needed advance
to go anywhere near
the words that I fear
would be quite severe
that’s why I’m so stern
in my efforts to spurn
all that might turn
me back where I started
to before I departed
from my worries about an aching hamstring.
Always Having Fun with Medical Terms: I T Band
So, the I T in IT band stands for Iliotibial. It’s a tendon that extends from your ilium (a wide, flat bone at the top of your hip) to your tibia (shin). What other fun things could IT stand for?
Free (IT) Band Name
- the isosceles triangles
- imperious tina and the intolerable treaties
- insatiable teresa and the intimate tulips
- the intrepid toddlers
- the irritable tigers
- intelligent tom and the incubating theories
- the iambic torsos
- the important tubas
- the inelegant toadstools
- the infringing tableaus
I T Band Again
- Impossible Tangrams
- Interested Termites
- Indistinguishable Twins
- Indifferent Theses
- Infamous Tattletales
- Imprecise Tailors
- Incanting Taylors
- Impeded Traffic
- Impeachable Tyrants
- Icicle Tinsel
- Invigorated Triathletes
- Insatiable Tricksters
- Ill-fitting T-shirts
When medical jargon scares me, I like to drain it of its power by making it strange, deranging it. I scramble the letters and re-imagine it in whimsical ways.
O S T E O P H Y T E (bone spur)
yo, the poets
hot eye post
oh, toes type?
set too hype
hot pot eyes
O testy hope!
M R I (Magnetic Resonance Imaging)
Musty Rusty Incubators
Myopic Readers Irritate
Miniature Rhinos Incite
Monster Roosters Incant
Mutant Rats Infiltrate
Moody Radicals Impinge
R I C E (rest ice compression elevation)
red indigo copper ecru
ribbon ink carbon electromechanical
rancid icky curdled eggs
Rosie is currently elated
rapture is coming early
random isotopes create elements
Rhode Island can’t even