A diner placemat in Tulsa got me unstuck after 6 weeks of blank pages

Last month I was sitting in a diner in Tulsa, Oklahoma, waiting on a patty melt, and the paper placemat had this dumb little game on it where you cross out words to make a story. I had been stuck for 6 weeks on a prompt about a lighthouse keeper who loses his hearing, just staring at a blank doc every night after work. So I flipped the placemat over and wrote down 8 random words from the menu, like griddle, gravel, apron, and that sort of thing. Then I forced myself to build a scene using all 8 before my food even showed up. It took me 12 minutes and the scene was rough, but it had a real character in it for the first time in weeks. I think the trick was that the words were stupid on purpose, so my brain stopped trying to be clever and just started making stuff up. Now I keep a stack of old takeout menus in my desk drawer for when a prompt goes dead on me. What random junk do you guys grab when a prompt just will not move?