The Next Great Idea

You woke up late that morning. You wake up late often, but before you say anything, I know I need to stop constantly reminding you of this. Nagging is the word you started using with me, and believe you me, I’m not trying to be a nag, but I come from a family of naggers, and it’s hard to break with tradition. Plus, I can’t figure out how else to get you to do things. I swear there are times where you sit and do nothing when you know perfectly well that I’m watching and desperate for you to run some errand or complete a house project. I’d understand if you had something better to do, but you just sit there, and I’m left pulling my hair out, believing that your aim is to drive me crazy. Well, it’s working.

I’m sure you’ll somehow find it in that big watermelon that you call a heart to forgive me for reminding you of all of this again. You know how I sometimes get going, but since you seem to forgive my other failings after enough prodding, I figure it was worth the risk. Not to put too fine a point on the matter, but you might have had the Next Great Idea earlier that day and probably saved yourself a lot of hassle, but because you woke up late, it wasn’t until the early afternoon that you had it.

Our bedroom was freezing that morning after you turned off the heat before going to bed. You were on a conservation kick thanks to an over-inflated gas bill. You told the children that you were sick and tired of paying enough to heat a small town. What you probably don’t remember is that all three of our children came down with colds a few days later. While I can’t prove your energy-saving exploits caused the colds, I’m sure we both know, if only one of us will admit, it was a “contributing factor.” I skipped showering that morning because of the cold, snuck from the bedroom, and brought the children to my mother’s to thaw.

You breakfasted on warm toast and salmon cream-cheese spread and pretended as if the cold didn’t bother you. You wore your terry bathrobe and bear slippers, but you couldn’t fool yourself for long. With the children and me out of the house and before your toast was even toasted, you moved the dial on the thermostat from sixty degrees up to seventy degrees, and even cracked a smile when you heard the heating fan turn on. That smile sparked the Next Great Idea. It struck as ideas have a wont to do, when you were thinking about nothing, your mind drifting. You relived your play in yesterday’s pickup game, focusing on recounting all the great plays while conveniently forgetting the fouls and defensive breakdowns that led to your team losing and you sitting out the next three games. And then your mind shifted to the stack of work on your desk, but you fought that it down. I don’t know how you do it, and I wish you would teach me one day, but you have an uncanny ability to put responsibility out of your mind. The responsibility might explode a few days later in a frenzied anxiety-driven work, but for the moment, your mind blanks and you run around without a care in the world.

The Next Great Idea hit you so hard you sat down. Sitting down only made the idea sound better. You were desperate to work out the details, but you knew there would be plenty of time for that later. You contemplated writing it down, but you didn’t think there was anyway you would forget such an idea. It was that good.

***

Yeah, it is half a story that went nowhere fast. I don’t know who has sapped all my creative energy, but I’m hoping to turn the spigot back on one of these days. I know, I know, baby steps, all baby steps. (That and finish my website rewrite. I can’t sit for more than ten minutes without wanting to get up there and finish coding it.)

I don’t usually start writing with a title, but this time I did. I had what I thought was a brilliant idea this morning for a new story, and, as happens to me often, I forgot what it was. At the time, I remembered thinking to myself, this is such a good idea, there is no way I could ever forget it. And then I forgot it. I thought the forgetting itself, since it’s been happening to me often lately, was a great idea in itself to write into a story.

I almost started the story with “you are sitting there,” but remembered that I abhorred stories, paragraphs, and sentences that began with sitting or staring—call it the Marathon-influenced nightmare.

My fingernails grow too quickly. After two weeks of nail growth, my typing rate, especially on my laptop, slows. My nails don’t feel the keys as well as my fingertips. I’m sure it’ll take me another few days to remember to bring my nail clipper into the shower. I’m terrible with the clippings, and unless I let the shower drain take them away, I’ll end up with clippings all over my rug, which causes problems since I seldom vacuum it.

Write a vignette about one thing, spending the entire time on it—e.g., Tabasco bottle. Stylistic point: stop using e.g., i.e., and viz. until I learn Latin. I read a review of a biography in the New Yorker about a famous painter—after reading the review, I feel I learned enough about the painter not to read the biography—who gave an art class at university, and in the first session, after setting up a still life, told his students that they would spend the entire semester painting this one still life until it was perfect. They would then kill the painting, only to recreate it after it was dead. I’m not sure what he was talking about—most of his American students ran out in fear—but I felt if it’s good enough for him, it’s good enough for me. See how easily influence I am by reading stuff?

Immortality Pill: Guys are naturally shorter than girls are—how does that change the world.