I have an idea folder. It’s a very big folder. Some of the ideas are really old. Some are really new. It’s really a buffet of ideas. Eduardo Galeano (I think I got that right) writes that dreams are bottles on a shelf waiting to be taken down, uncorked and dreamt. This idea folder is my shelf of corked dreams waiting to be uncorked.

It’s a buffet of choices and a miasma of persons. In this folder — I rifle through it now — are outlines for stories, novels, a play, a screenplay. Ideas for paintings, for a series of paintings. If I painted all of my ideas I’d have hundreds of paintings. Some children’s books I want to write and illustrate. Some poems. Some ideas for poems. A poem about ideas for poems. There’s a couple of cartoons in there I want to animate. Ideas for funny companies. An idea for an idea company. Concept Inc. We conceive it, you acheive it. There are lost wandering characters — character outlines — disassociated from any plot. There are endings to stories with no beginning and beginnings of stories with no endings. There’s a collection of anti-Hallmark cards. There’s a screenplay that’s just a collection of job interviews gone badly. There’s a couple of comic strips, barely started. A story about a suicide artist who would conceive all of these beautiful ways to manage it but also never goes through with it because he could never be sure it would be the most aesthetic way. A story about a guy who creates an alter ego and lives his life in his alter ego and likes his alter ego so much he becomes his alter ego, a kind of self-induced amnesia that serves him for a time, but something goes terribly wrong. I could never figure out what that terribly wrong thing was though.

If I had the luxury and the inclination to dive into my idea folder I wouldn’t need to pop my head out of that rabbit hole until I was quite dead.

I’m sure life must be a lot easier if you have one thing. A straight line. A focus. A goal. A plan. A schedule. My life has all been hopscotch and patchwork and that was beautiful and entertaining in my 20s. It’s becoming a lot harder to justify. A life of starting and not finishing.

What’s the middle part of a teeter-totter called? Is that a fulcrum? I am most firmly middle aged. These ought to be my fulcrum years. And I am not nearly balanced enough for that. No, on the teeter-totter of life, I am the skinny kid wriggling on the ground after my knees impacted my chin, after that moment of weightlessness in my gut, after the sharp jolt to my groin, after the funny fat kid — my counterbalance — hopped off.

SS