This morning he forgot a truly great idea, an idea for a story. The story was speculative and absurd and ambitious and awesome. He thought of it while standing outside his apartment on the concrete steps that led from the alley down to the hidden garden where he often stood cracking peanut shells and staring. He wasn’t cracking peanut shells this particular morning though, only staring, staring at peanut shells previously cracked, recalling how his wife had enthusiastically requested on more than one occasion that he sweep them up. Or down. Either way. All this was entirely relevant and even intrinsic to the truly great story idea. The truly great story would be set in the near future where all truly great speculative stories are set. This story would have to do with great visions for society and how the greater the vision, the more elusive sustainability becomes. Picture some protagonist. Who cares what they sound like. Who cares what they smell like. The point is they would have this great idea, a truly great one, some grandiose vision for the improvement of all things, not just all things with regard to this particular situation but with regard to all situations, everybody’s situation and everything regarding them, and our protagonist would take bold and savvy steps to implement this idea and would meet with some success. People would see this success and would want to identify with it and so would come on board and try to help implement even more aspects of the original vision and it would all work, a little. Here however is when the success rate starts to slow. Here now is where the story truly begins. Here’s page one. Everything up to this moment would get cut in with backstory or dialogue or whatever’s clever. We start with our however-sounding-however-smelling protagonist’s day of reckoning. Today he is compelled to ponder what the problem is, whether it’s minor and local or far flung and systemic, a flaw deep down in the marrow of things. Where did it all go wrong and when will it go right? He gets sad thinking about this and starts to worry that the original idea was not especially great at all. Maybe it was even a bad idea and both he and the world would have been better off if he had just forgotten the whole thing rather than set about the dubious business of implementing it. He gets more and more despondent until he can no longer remember what the original truly great idea even was. Was it about a semiotic cross between bigfoot and Jesus, or did it have something to do with urban development and vegetables? Were startups involved? At this point the original idea is truly and irrevocably gone, so gone that both he and we have to question whether it was ever there in the first place. By the final page, all our protagonist can do, whatever he sounds like, whatever he smells like, is grope about that sterile space his idea formerly occupied, a tall and drafty room upstairs in his mind’s dilapidated mansion, some vapid square of space without a piano or pictures on the walls, just crooked nails and a million cracked peanut shells sprent all across the hardwood floor. Which, sadly, he begins to sweep up.
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