Monday, November 15, 2010

Free writing

That Fred believed a combination nursing home and whorehouse was a splendid idea would surprise no one who knew him. It was somewhat more surprising that he could find so many RNs who were also experienced prostitutes. It was genuinely alarming that he had gotten this far along in the loan application process at one of the largest banks operating in Nevada. "Health care and sex work have a lot in common both in terms of the skills you have to bring to them and the outcomes you can expect with the clients," he said to the assembled skeptical faces.

5 comments:

Nordom said...

Okay. That's a lot less horrible than what I was thinking when I first read "combination nursing home and whorehouse." (My first thought being, of course, that it would be patients, not nurses, who would be the prostitutes.)

joel hanes said...

Rob, you might enjoy the Anthony Villiers novels by Alexei Panshin.

Rob Helpy-Chalk said...

From one of said novels: "Torve was bemused by the way a nail would retreat into the wood after it had been hit on the head"

That does sound good.

Evelyn Brister said...

Having been away from the Helpychalk blog for awhile, I feel like I'm missing something.

So I'm wondering, what IS free writing? Is its function to produce wonderful new thoughts like this one about the similarity between nursing homes and whorehouses? Is it done in service to some other goal or for its own sake?

I know you like free things and freeing things, so I'm wondering, too, "free" like the prize that's no longer in a box of Cracker Jack or "free" like the lions of the Serengeti?

Rob Helpy-Chalk said...

Its "free" like I couldn't think of anything else to call it, what the audience for it was, or where it was heading, but I decided to put it out there anyway.