Incite Full

I guess the person best fit for ‘management’ in the utopian sense is technically proficient and altruistic towards the business/customer for which he works.

I have a lot of ideas that people tell me are terrible, but I like them so I’ve decided to share twohere.

1. Pizza Hut is missing out on an amazing opportunity. Currently they pay drivers to make small, local trips. rarely a high way in use. What other market has people making local drives, and fear of highways? New Drivers. Pizza hut driving school would allow for cheap labor (free) while providing a useful service to the rest of the community. I like the idea of the pizza guy giving my pizza and being so happy he made it here alive he cannot complain about the minuscule tip i am about to give him. Let’s make this work, people.

2. This one has legs. And more importantly, blatant and vicious honesty. It’s essentially a phone bank where people can call in and leave a message and a number for the operators to call. We then call that number and give them the message. Sure it could be used as a go-between for drug deals and other scams, but it can also b used to say things that people are afraid to say. With the advent of the internet, people everywhere have become used to passive communication. No longer can one tell a friend he has bad breath or body odor. Or even break up with a person without a text message. This way, people can have an intermediary give the bad news and remain completely anonymous.

Yes this could be  used against certain people, if someone calls in for you and tells the operator to confess to cheating on a wife, for example, that would suck. But i’m thinking of the money making possibilities. Make these people call in and listen to advertisements before getting the news. Have it tailored to their issue… can’t last in bed? How about viagra or some numbing lotion. Bad breath? Listerine would love this target demographic.

Like I said, this idea has legs… I say we run with it.

The Cult of Done Manifesto

1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
3. There is no editing stage.
4. Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
7. Once you’re done you can throw it away.
8. Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.
9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
11. Destruction is a variant of done.
12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
13. Done is the engine of more

I bought a slip and slide today.

Before you ask, it was not the megashark slip ‘n slide, also available in 3-d. I could only wish.

The idea of a slip ‘n slide, however, is misguided. Ii mean, you’re taking a running start and diving on to a water filled surface. There is definitely sliding involved, but I don’t think there is slipping. Slipping, to me, involves some accident, a push from the gods that sends you stumbling; reeling, to go with water imagery. No, they need a better name for slip ‘n slides. Unfortunately I’m fresh out of ideas on the matter.

That’s what I’m good at, eh? Bitching about things. If I werne’t me I’d probably be really annoyed by me. Anyways, instead of bitching about something I’m going to say something nice. I’ve always been jealous of thsoe that can create something out of nothing, or those who can change the way in which I look at the world. It’s not an easy thing to do, but it happens nearly every day.

Most of the time, for me, it’s about books and the written word, but I know it happens in music and the other arts as well.

So I’m going to create something. Not sure what it is yet, but i’ll let you know when I figure that out. If it is a book, i’ve got a few things I think I’d liek to talk about, themse and motifs, really. here they are in no particular order:

Oneirology, or the study of dreams. I am not really fleshed out on this one, but I’d like to think there are oneironaugts- people who can change and control dreams. Like a friendly or villainous Freddy Kreuger.

Free-running (non-entrained) sleep.

Phantom Pain

Our blame-everyone-else-but-me society

Twitter and the diarrhea of information we get daily

Perfectionism

Consumerism (ugh)

and a few others that are a little too difficult to explain concisely.

Quotations are an interesting thing. Sometimes I’ll be feeling a thought about something; food, defeat, happiness- anything, and I can Google a listing of quotes that refer to this. It’s a really simply way of finding the exact words to describe a feeling that i’m having, or a thought too intricate for me to do justice in the time I have. After all, if someone has already said it best, “steal from them and go out strong.”

There are problems with this, however. And it’s not what you’re thinking. Let me back up, I don’t mean to be presumptuous.

I take an issue with the ability to take a feeling as complex as love or hate, throw it into google, and be satisfied with the result, although I often do this. There are a handful of quotes I can pick from memory, but they don’t often apply. I can’t quote Palahniuk’s rebel yell against consumerism if I’m not feeling that same emotion. The square peg doesn’t always fit.

No, the issue is these quotes have no meaning to me personally. They are filtered out of their original context and placed on a page because they share a word or two with other famous sayings. The problem with this, in my opinion, is that these lines are often the fuse on the powder keg. By this I mean there is a  motif or theme building up to these all-too-poetic, transcendent words. I feel these are sublime moments for the author, the white whale of their novel- the words aren’t right for weeks, months, or years and then, they fall onto the page and are nothing else but perfect.

Who am I to cheat an author out of his work? To disregard the rest of those novel thoughts and words without which the quotation wouldn’t be powerful, quotable. These authors didn’t have google or yahoo or whatever the new, flavor-of-the-day search engine is- they read everything, made notes in the margin, wrote letters to their friends recommending books. We have it too easy now- so easy to be lazy and allow others to do the work for us.

I’ve started to write down the quotes and things that move me, that make me step back from the page and think to myself about what I read. Those moments don’t come fast enough, which is good, but what is true about them is they conjure up a thought and emotion in me. Something that is mine. It was me that witnessed the creation of a thought, that inkling of wonder or serendipity. It’s as if we have thought all of these things before, but the words are  l’esprit d’escalier; the words find us only after we need them.

Enough of that.

Today ended the first season of softball in my competitive league. We definitely came in last palce, which is altogether fine. I’m not worried about it, and we ended up going out to celebrate, or at the very worst commiserate, our season long struggle. I had an absolutely terrible offensive day, which I guess is forgivable seeing as how we lost by 12- Not much I could have done to sway the tide.

Speaking of tide, I’m starting to get tired of some cliched analogies: ocean, road, and car metaphors. If there are things in the world that are mentally grating to me, those are them. For some reason I don’t need to hear you are drowning in anything, an inspirational moment is not like coming up for air, and Robert Frost and Yogi Berra can talk about forks in the road, but you probably should leave it to them.

Why isn’t life like a bicycle? In fact, I like it better. Think about it this way: A bicycle is clean, ehalthy, self-powered, self-started, complicated gears working together to make things easier. If something is off, the bike moves forward but more difficultly, if things are really bad, you’re stuck. Compare to a car: Needs fuel, protects those doing the driving from the elements and the world, forward and reverse with a large turning radius- this isn’t life it’s a condom. It’s protection, keeping you from whatever is out there.

Let’s all agree to move on from the car analogies then. Perfect.