My brain is not exactly overflowing with brilliant ideas*. At times I can be creative, but those times are far, like the sun, and few between, like hair on your balls. In fact I picture what’s happening inside my mind not as an overflowing so much as a kind of slow-moving drain after a shower, where a little whirlpool makes its feeble way past that slick gunk build-up that you know is under the drain plug but that you don’t want to touch until you have to, with Q-tips or something, while a thin soap film atop the water churns toward oblivion.
But then you notice there is a speck of something, a little fuzzy thing maybe, and as the last of the water disappears down the drain, for whatever reason, this little fuzzy thing gets left behind. It doesn’t go down the drain. And you think, what is that thing there? Is it lint? Was it in my butt crack? And so you turn the tub water on again for a second thinking, there, that will get it, but again, the water disappears and whatever it is, butt lint or maybe some pubes that got tangled up in a kind of miniature soggy tumbleweed, it is still hanging on around the edge of the drain, shifting a bit, but refusing to go away. Why is it still hanging around?
That thing hanging around—that is the idea. It’s creativity in waiting. It is the fuzzy seed of that rare occasion that my mind is holding onto for dear life—the butt lint idea, the tumblepube.
And so when that happens, you can at your peril ignore it or try again to wash it away, or you can accept that this is the best you can do, and at least it is a start. So you nurture it. This idea that seems ridiculous, and maybe a little gross, a little unsanitary, even though it just got cleaned. You let it sit. You think about it. You take a walk and you come back to it and try to bring it to life, to some form worthy enough to set it in front of others in the light of day so that they may share in the joy of your creation, which in itself is an incomplete joy, waiting to be fully realized in the eyes and mind of another’s consciousness.
So my advice to you, when this happens, is to save that fuzzy little guy from becoming part of the gunk, from disappearing into the dark and ever-growing mass of dead ideas. Do not criticize your mind. Take this thing, this little lint pube, and grow it, drag it into the light, so that others may experience what you have created, because an idea, and nearly everything else in life, isn’t anything until it is shared.
*I am envious of those creative people who seem to be a never-ending wellspring of fresh and original ideas. Those who relentlessly plug away to create from nothing something extraordinary, beautiful, inspiring, hilarious, heartbreaking. For me most were authors or comedians: Kurt Vonnegut, Hunter Thompson, David Sedaris, Bill Hicks, Chris Farley, Jack Handey, and most of the cast of SNL from 1976 through 1993.
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