A New Essay

The following is a piece that I wrote in this journal but that I finally copied and pasted into an essay I called “The Million Dollar Idea.” I put it up on my web site for anyone to read. Let’s see what happens, eh?

I live in a neighborhood far from the city near cows and pastures and old farm houses. The neighborhood is filled with little children and big children and mothers and fathers, dogs, cats, wild rabbits and birds. There are toys and bicycles, swing sets, pools and trampolines, and a gas grille on every deck. I live in suburbia where in the night sky the starts always seem to shine bright, where you can hear the bark of a dog probably a mile away and where you can sit out on your porch at night in the summer and be lulled to sleep by the millions of crickets serenading one another.

The other day while standing on my second floor landing and peering out of our large foyer window at part of suburbia (for I tend to do a lot of peering when I’m in mid thought) I noticed something interesting about he neighbor’s driveway across the street. The children there were nowhere to be seen, but on their driveway were colorful chalk renderings of snowmen, complete with scarves and hats and button noses.

The chalk drawings seemed suspiciously similar, and perhaps too perfect, and so I wondered just how they went about creating them. And then a word popped into my head (a word that, had my wife not been a scrapbooking fanatic, mind you, would never have done any popping in my head or anywhere else): stencil. And so, as my brain is wont to do, I began to obsess over the ideas that flowed in and out and back in again; reality ceased momentarily and, at some point, I found myself at the top of the stairs leading down to the first floor and I appeared (or imagined I had) as if I were about to take a swan dive. I came to in time to stop myself from breaking my neck and then ran downstairs and did a jig around the center kitchen isle and sang a silly song and my wife, who was standing over the sink rinsing out a dish, must have thought me completely mad.

Sidewalk stencils, I cried. It was a million dollar idea, I thought over and over. Sidewalk stencils! Sidewalk stencils! Sidewalk stencils! In the time that these words had popped into my head until I made my way down to the kitchen, I had already thought up five designs, packaging, artwork and a sales pitches. As I chanted sidewalk stencils it finally dawned on my wife and she finally understood what I was babbling about and so she, too, took to doing a jig with me, circling the center kitchen isle and singing a silly song. What a thought, I thought. A million dollar thought. And she and I hugged and we strolled over to the family room to tell our cockatiel, Sammie, who, preening his feathers from his behind, appeared to not share in our enthusiasm at all, but rather looked up once, in what was undoubtedly his look of annoyance, as if to tell us to go mind our own business.

Shortly after our shenanigans my wife and I plopped down on the couch to rest, and as I sat there next to her thinking about what I would do with all that money, my wife looked over at me and asked if I had bothered to search on the web for this particular sort of thing before going ape like I had. Of course I’d completely forgotten in the excitement of dreaming up what I’d imagined to be a completely unique idea. With all the other million dollar ideas that I’d had that turned out to have already been thought out, built up and marketed by someone else, I don’t know why I didn’t first try to find a reference to something like it on the internet. I really don’t know why I keep doing this to myself. Perhaps its just the joy of thinking about something you’ve never seen or thought of before. Or perhaps its just that I’m an idiot.

Anyway, as you might imagine, feeling somewhat deflated, I gingerly sauntered up the stairs, ambled into my office, plopped myself in front of my PC and, for five minutes, stared at my computer screen trying to get up the courage to be disappointed. I typed in the words “Sidewalk Stencil,” and wouldn’t you know it. A company called Cadaco had already marketed the idea. What’s worse is that I found myself staring at the very thing that I’d imagined only a short time before, almost exactly as I had pictured it, packaging, size, colors and all. The only thing that didn’t spring to mind were the Care Bears, the particular theme of these Sidewalk Stencils. But given time, boy, I bet I would have thought of that, too.

Although its still painful for me to think about the death of our unborn child, its getting a little easier to bear. Of course I’ve been obsessing more over food and Sherri thinks its because I am more depressed now. The medication I take helps, I’m sure, but there is no medication I don’t think would help completely.

I’ve been tossing around ideas for a name for a software company. I want to start my own and so I thought I might as well give it a shot. “Theory X” is the latest one that has tickled my nads, but of course feelings like these are ephemeral. Tomorrow it may seem completely ridiculous. How about “Dark Matter Software.” Hmm.. Suburban Software? Software of Suburbia? How about ADD Software (ADD as in attention deficit disorder). Radio Daze, Purple Salamander, Yellow Roses. Olde Chaps Software.

I submitted my latest piece, The Million Dollar Idea, to “New Works Review.” We’ll see what happens. I’m excited, though, that INTHEFRAY.COM wants to publish my piece called “A Society of Cards.” Neither publication pays, but what can you do. Exposure is the thing that’s most important. All my essays of late have been biographic and claustrophobic, which I use to mean that they don’t stray in content very far from my own little work—think E. B. White and his talk about the death of his pig.