The Review Club Forum Writing Prompt Fun Time

So here's a couple of writing prompts for you to chew on while you're working on your reviews:

Ten million prescriptions are filled incorrectly ever year, write about one of them.

OR

Write about what happened when someone put LSD on the communion wafers.

All depends on the dose.

If sixty micrograms, as given to alcoholics before the ill-advised criminalization of this, one of the ten greatest inventions of the twentieth century, then the worshipers will have a happy feelling at least for the rest of the day. Unless, of course, they are consumed with the guilt and shame they brought with them to their worship service.

If four hundred micrograms, then the likelyhood is that they will experience the true blood. They will see that the past is memory, that the future is hopes and dreams, neither which have any substance whatsoever. They will see the eternal now, in which the voice of self and other, and of whatever they have taken God to be, is all one voice pouring from innumberable mouths. They will see that anyone who says the individual needs a middleman, a church, to mediate between them and their God, is more likely a huckster than a selfless bodhisattva.

I'll throw in something that I am playing with. It comes from the December issue of Writer's Digest with slight modifications by me:
Quote:

I bet all of us would have interesting takes on this.

... so the guy with a terminal disease returns the pills and enters into a relationship with the beautiful pharmacy assistant who nurses him back to life - I'm thinking Julia Roberts ...

What if, Wheldon, the guy with the terminal disease who's an atheist decides one day to question his lack of faith, and that happens to be the same day some local high school pranksters slip some liquid planned for a triple dip batch of ridiculous s**t that will hit big that summer into the grape juice of the Methodist church he attends? He, in a hallucinogenic stupor, falls for the lay speaker. She, a vibrant if misguided philanthropist, marries him because she believes the money from his trust funds (two) will increase her ability to "charm for charity" and also buy expensive shoes. They both end up creating and spearheading an organization that focuses on spreading the word to white males who only eat a certain raw bran, but eventually he faces jail time after she cracks under the pressure of an IRS investigation over how she claims shoe purchases in the charity budget and gives up information regarding his unusual taste in sea urchins. The man swallows the rest of the liquid acid he'd been saving since his marriage and pushes himsef off in a canoe with no paddle down a most impassable section of the Amazon.

hey Jeff - yes, that would be a brilliant and interesting tale - but would you be able to sell it to Hollywood? Mine encapsulates in one sentence a simplicity and predictability millions will rush to see at the movies and involve a script that could be written while on set. What more could a producer want?

You're right. Who'd play your guy? Matthew McConaughey?

More of a Harrison Ford/Julia Roberts - older man with georgeous kids who lost their mother in a car accident ... can you see them all leaving the hospital to spend time together at their beach home - the sunrises, the sunsets, the long walks on the beaches - beautiful!

A little acid could nudge someone with at least an inclination to faith into a full experience of it. Someone who really doesn't believe would just have the run of the mill visual and aural enhancements. But the way acid and mushrooms reach into the brain could be a conduit for someone to really open up to the meaning of their religion, if they have a decent grounding in it's teachings.
I speak as a both serious a Catholic and someone with a bit of experience with hallucinogens. I don't think I can relate to the possible experience of people without either the religious inclination or the intellectual curiosity that I have myself to be able to imagine their reactions. I'm afraid a great many people with religious sensibilities and senses considerably dulled are weekly communicants.
My own religious conversion was facilitated by acid, as it happens. I'd been teetering on the brink for a long time, and sort of preparing for conversion for years. I'd come to an intellectual acceptance of Christian doctrine, but had to share an intense trip with a friend to get nudged over into real experience of the "faith" I knew with my rational brain. Only then was I able to begin learning to have real faith. (And I haven't done acid or mushrooms since.)
Some bits of my fiction deal with this sort of thing, actually. In a roundabout way.

What Leah says is exemplary of the point I often make about psychedelics. When people say, "Oh, those are just hallucinations, nothing to do with reality," I point out that, if one learns something valuable in any state of mind, and that learning sticks and becomes useful once that state of mind, drug induced or not, passes, then the experience, having real outcomes, is a part of reality, not a mere meaningless mirage.

Hi everybody,

I'm loving the discussion - it's both interesting and hysterical (you know who you funny guys are). That said - I wanna see stories!!! I've seen some pretty interesting concepts batted about. Now I want to see some copy. (Yes, this is a friendly admin nudge.)

-cc

When Gerald Goodbody, senior altar boy at the One True Word, arrived especially early this morning, he had been intending to spread the content of his tiny vial of LSD-25 evenly across the communion wafters that in a few hours would serve the congregation of 77 lucky souls.

Such a devout bunch of wonderful people, he reasoned, should have the same opportunity as his circle of friends, who gathered regularly in Doug Dote's backyard shed and party room. For out in that shed they'd not only been hearing, but also tasting, seeing, and being the One True Word a month of weekend's, ever since Doug had returned from San Francisco with that last batch of Sandoz Imported.

Gerald held the vile out over the wafers, just about to spice the first row when the voice of Father Glick sounded directly behind him. "Gerald, you devout boy. Devil wouldn't let you sleep last night, eh?"

Gerald's startled heart leaped and his hand twitched, spilling the whole content of the vile, 77 doses, on a single wafter, maybe two. He closed his fist over the vile and turned to Glick, barely in control, said, "