Waiting for the Last Gasp – Adam Overland

Inventions I’ll never create, businesses I’ll never start, and titles of novels I’ll never write.

Sometimes I think of inventions I’ll never create, businesses that I’ll never start, and titles of novels I’ll never write. I like to think of myself as the proverbial “idea man,” where I come up with something good and let someone else run with it, except no one ever runs with it.

Over the years I’ve thought of dozens of ideas in each category (invention/biz/novel), but unfortunately I haven’t kept very good track of them, so can’t enumerate them here. But I did pitch a business idea to a friend the other day, and I can give you at least one invention idea, and a couple novel titles right off the bat.

One novel would be called “Link in bio: The desperate anthem of a doomed generation,” and it’s probably pretty self-explanatory if you’re on social media. The other novel idea is “Potato don’t count: a vegetable’s quest for acceptance.” The “potato don’t count” part of that is from a friend, Rebecca, who said to me once that “potato don’t count” as a vegetable when I claimed I ate vegetables. In fact, my doctor recently told me I should probably skip the potatoes entirely because it’s essentially just sugar (I countered that fries have tons of salt, too), proving Rebecca correct while offering further justification for the novel. 

In fact, it was Rebecca who I was talking with the other day who mentioned yoga, which got me thinking about yogurt and synergies. Today’s world is full of synergies. Things can’t be just one thing anymore. Things have to be two things, or even three things to be a thing that is successful. So it’s Twix, or ice cream cake, or yogurt and fruit in the same cup (these are all food examples because I haven’t eaten dinner). 

So I pitched Rebecca on the idea of a yoga-yogurt combo store, which strikes me as a good idea. People who do yoga for sure also eat yogurt, because those are two healthy things healthy people do, and those same people also probably like being outdoors but not too outdoors, so they like glamping, and that means yurts. And so my idea quickly evolved to be a combination yoga-yogurt-yurt store, a triple-synergy, like Twix but better. But then when I moved on to my favorite part of the business idea, which is coming up with the name of the business, I thought that the best name for that particular combo would probably be “Yogurt,” which is problematic, so I let it go.

As far as inventions, when I used to smoke I toyed with the idea of the oatmeal cigarette. The premise was simple: Cigarettes cause cancer; oatmeal might help prevent it. Therefore, an oatmeal cigarette cancels out the cancer. Our slogan would have been, “It might not be good for you. But maybe it’s not too bad for you? Smoke.” 

My best idea, though, has to do with toast. It’s always bothered me how long it takes to make toast. You toss the bread in and then look down into the slots and wait for those stupid little wires that are spaced about an inch apart to warm up, which takes forever, and then you sit there another minute or two depending on how well you want your toast done. And it’s just unbelievable to me that we put a man on the moon more than 50 years ago and still we’re waiting around for the fucking toast all goddamn day like we don’t have anything better to do. 

Initially I thought you could have a hydraulic toaster. This would apply not only heat but tremendous pressure, tens of thousands of pounds per square inch. It would function on the same principle as when earth turns carbon deposits into diamonds, except it would do it way faster, and you can’t eat diamonds. But then I realized the toast would be flat, more like a cracker, and so it’s not really toast. Plus it would require a 150,000 amp breaker. 

That is why ideally the toaster would be gas powered, and it would spray a small amount of that gas evenly onto the toast and then ignite a spark that would quickly light up the toast, burning away the gas and leaving behind a nice, evenly browned piece of toast. And sure, there might be a little gas residue left behind, but unless you’re a freak who eats toast plain, you’re not going to taste a tiny bit of gas under the peanut butter or jelly. And that actually reminds me of the in-ground gas sprinkler system I thought of once that would serve dual purposes (talk about synergies): clearing snow, and clearing unwanted visitors. But that is for another time.