A Riverside Superior Court judge denied the legal bid March 30, leaving the Ward 2 candidate's ballot designation intact heading into the June primary.
Welcome back! Last week we poked at our creative side using thumbtacks - pinning ideas down, maybe literally, maybe metaphorically. Did you leave your mark somewhere unexpected? Perhaps a tiny hole in a piece of junk mail or a slightly larger one in your creative comfort zone. However you stuck with it, I hope it held your attention for a few good minutes.
This week, we’re reaching for something softer that finds its way into most of our places where we keep “extras” of things just in case: a disposable napkin. They are arranged in neat stacks, tucked alongside takeout containers or handed out in hopeful excess by considerate service employees. Those never-ending dispensers found everywhere make them seem like an inexhaustible resource. You need one, you take seven. You use maybe two. The rest migrate into glove compartments, kitchen drawers, coat pockets, waiting ready for a random spill or sneezing fit.
They’re symbols of convenience, sure. Each one is designed for a single, fleeting purpose. A quick wipe, a polite dab, and then…out of sight, out of mind.
But what if we interrupted that lifecycle? What if those extras became something else instead of banishment into oblivion. Temporary art. Ephemeral expression. Creativity with an expiration date and a guilt-free recycling bin ending.
I’m trying to look at my own stashes with a more creative motive. Have you noticed that different places give you different napkins? Single ply see throughs from the fast-food pizza spot in a strip mall. Those sturdier brown ones popular in coffee shops. Then the “high end” places that go through the trouble of embossing theirs. When I’m travelling, those double as free souvenirs for this frugal vacationer.
I have countless notepads and sketchbooks (and reams of printer paper I boosted from my employer), but there’s something freeing about creating on a surface that isn’t precious. No pressure. No permanence. Just a few minutes of making something out of almost nothing.
So, snag a fistful, and let’s unfold a few creative possibilities with one or more of these prompts:
1. Back of a Napkin: Flatten out a napkin, notice the textures, the perforated edges, the faintly pressed patterns. Use a pen, pencil, or whatever’s nearby to work with those textures instead of against them. Let the folds guide your composition. Turn it into a tiny landscape, a face, or an abstract design. Bonus: display your napkin art somewhere temporary—a dashboard, a fridge door, or tucked into a book like a future pop-up exhibit.
2. In Bloom: Transform it into a flower. Twist the center, bunch the layers, gently pull apart the thin sheets to create petals. Feel how fragile it is, how easily it tears. This is sculpture at its most delicate. Make one or make a bouquet. Imperfection is the point; each flower can have its own personality.
3. Crumplesition: Hold a napkin close to your ear and slowly crush it. Then flatten it. Tear it. Rub it between your fingers. Each action produces sounds. Record a short “rustling napkin symphony” on your phone. Can you create rhythm? Can you tell a story using only these quiet sounds?
4. Napkin 2.0: Imagine napkins made from something completely unexpected. Aluminum napkins? Glass? Napkins made of leaves, clouds, or a ten-cent paper bag? Write a short description, advertisement, or scene where these napkins exist. How do they feel? Who uses them? Push the idea just far enough to surprise yourself.
5. Archeological, Dig: Take a used napkin. Coffee-stained, sauce-marked; it’s seen some things. Use the stains as a prompt to write a few lines of micro-fiction or a memory fragment. Let the marks guide the narrative. This is storytelling that begins with a trace.
Did you know that napkins, in one form or another, date back to ancient Rome, where diners used pieces of cloth (called mappa) to wipe their hands and even take leftovers home? Somewhere along the way, we traded permanence for convenience. But maybe, just for a few minutes this week, we can borrow a bit of that older mindset—treating even the most disposable object as something worth holding onto, if only briefly.
As you move through your week, keep an eye out for those extras—the ones you didn’t ask for but got anyway. They’re small invitations to pause, play, and make something fleeting but meaningful.
Because creativity doesn’t have to last forever to matter. Sometimes it just needs to last long enough to make you smile before it gets tossed, recycled, or tucked back into the glove box for another day.
This column was written with the help of a customized GPT from OpenAI. If I can make one, so can you.
