Speak to the yard of a house/apartment you grew up in.

If there was no yard, speak to the sidewalk or the street.

What food that you're not allergic to makes you absolutely gag at the thought of it? Have you ever found creative ways to avoid eating it?

Today is National Proposal Day. The laziest, most insincere day to propose to someone. Write a missive where you defy a calendar's suggestion.

Take a break in the midst of a form poem. Write a sestina, sonnet, villanelle or other strict poetry form but allow yourself to have at least one free verse (or other form, if you're feeling fancy) section interrupt the flow before going back and finishing the form.

My fiance was recently being a deliberate doof, and I opined "When did you turn into Ralph Wiggums?" to which he replied, "Joke's on you. I've always been Ralph Wiggums."

​What fictional character would you be terrified to discover you'd unwittingly been in a relationship with. 

I'm sure many of us have seen those charming videos of people who have buttons on their floor that cats can press to use human words. They press "I love you," wander over to nuzzle their human and then press "feed me you useless fuck" or whatever command/insult combination adequately expresses their inner-most feelings.

Predictive text is not quite as terrible as those cat buttons but it's close. Mine is always incorrect, often insisting I mean "ashtrays", which I've never purposefully typed into my phone, when I mean "always."

Imagine your least reliable pet somehow has access to your phone and decides to message some of your friends. Having no thumbs (or functionally useless thumbs if they're polydactyl), it's going to make some mistakes. How would predictive text translate their texts?

Street hockey was just like hockey but you played it on suburban streets with tennis balls, small nets, and sticks with cheap plastic on the end. It was a great way to experience something like hockey for those of whose parents had neither the time, energy, nor money to buy pads and skates or to drive us to some fancy ice rink. Bonus, we learned to pay close attention to traffic patterns!

Tell a story involving playing a budget version of a sport, video game, or adult task (as in a task performed by people you viewed as older, not a sexually explicit task) that you used to play as a kid or teen, and whether or not you enjoyed it.

Using the voice of a celebrity or fictional character you admire, write yourself the pep talk you need to read/hear. 

Every day of the year is noted for being several forgettable holidays. I know not every holiday can be New Year's Day or Canadian Thanksgiving but who is out there celebrating National People Named Emily Day or Bring Your Stapler To Lunch Day?

You?

Tell us about a little known holiday that you celebrate that you wish more of your friends and family would join in on.

Many disreputable corporations have laid off their customer service employees and replaced them with terrible and unhelpful AI. (We are living in The Worst Timeline.) Without using real AI, create a conversation between two incompetent bots that are supposed to be helpful.

Much modern sci-fi involving time travel mentions fixed points in time, and people whose deaths can't be changed without affecting the timeline. I think this is true of everyone. It's why I rarely time travel.

What do you offer the timeline that means you need to be protected at all costs?

Find five physical things in your house. Two that you use every day, two things that you like/need but don't use on a regular basis, and one thing that you either have no use for or that you don't understand its purpose.

​Write about what would happen were you to eat each of these items. 

The highlights of doomscrolling at stupid o'clock in the morning is that eventually, it just shows a series of videos of cute or unusual looking animals just being animals. Sometimes, it's accompanied by insipid music, and sometimes there's a person who claims to be an expert on  that particular animal sharing interesting or dubious facts about them.

We've had some animal fact prompts before. This time, find a video of a cute or unusual animal and just write an ode about how adorable/hideous/weird/fluffy/scaley it is. Ignore how it builds a nest or its dietary behaviors. Just praise it for being such a snuggly wuggly widduh woogums, or such a fierce looking so-and-so.

Vanilla is one of the most basic flavors you can get. Chocolate might be more widely available but if you ask someone for a plain ice cream, you're getting vanilla.

Several hundred years ago, vanilla was rare enough that it was only for royalty and the upper class. A twelve year old slave in Réunion named Edmond Abius discovered a way to make vanilla more plentiful. And while history now sort of acknowledges him, his milestone discovery didn't make him rich or famous. So the proliferation of the vanilla industry has a very troubled history.

What boring-ass thing that we now take for granted has a troubled history that we should know more about?

It's been thirty or forty years of my life, and I still think "The guy from Perfect Strangers?" when someone mentions Pierce Brosnan, and "James Bond?" on the very very rare occasion that someone mentions Bronson Pinchot.

What are two things you confuse that you really should have straightened out by now?

Find one of your favorite passages from your favorite books, and write a poem using only the words on that page. Don't cheat! You don't have to use all the words but you can't add anything to them.

Once you're done, toss the rules out the window and turn that finished remix into your own new poem weaved in and out of the remix, however you see fit.

It's National Cheese Doodle Day. I hope you didn't forget to buy your significant other their favorite puffed cheese snack flavor.

Tell us a story that somehow involves Cheese Doodles.

For me, I had a recurring terrible customer with a hauntingly high pitched voice and a proclivity for telling really dull stories that weren't even close to true. One of his favorite stories was how he had to constantly rebuy his favorite comics and books because his mother would read them while she was eating Cheetos, and getting fingerprints all over his books.

"Having a brand" is an attribute that people have been associating themselves with for well over a decade now. "My brand is crying with joy." "My brand is calling people Baboushka." "My brand is wearing purple hats and an eyepatch."

There is nothing right or wrong about having a brand or believing that your brand validates your identity. But whether personal branding is important to you or whether you think the entire idea is very silly, you can be sure that Someone who knows you imagines that something you do: be it wear thigh high boots, eat sardines for lunch every day, or just saying thank you to everyone at an impressive rate, someone who knows you think that's your brand.

Explain your personal brand to someone who doesn't know you. But explain it haphazardly, so that they may not be interested in buying what you are, to be fair, giving away for free anyway. 

There are a ton of expressions whose origin are lost to time and seem a little off.

​"Sweep you off your feet" is perfectly harmless expression that means to make oneself irresistible to someone they're attracted to. 

Create another expression or aphorism that includes a cleaning implement or behavior.

Misles are words that people learn from reading in a book, magazine, newspaper, on the internet, whathave you, but have never heard read aloud, and therefore they pronounce them incorrectly.

The term "Misles" referring to the word "misled" which many people pronounce "meyzled" until they hear it out loud. 

What word have you mispronounced because you hadn't heard it aloud, or you had heard it aloud but didn't connect it with the word you've read? (My favorite misle is a friend who pronounced "vague" as "va-gyoo.")

Now, come up with a definition for your mispronounced word, and educate us on how to use it properly.