From the cabinet of awesomeness
One of the questions I'm asked frequently is where do you get your ideas? Up to now, I've tried to answer it as best as I can, citing drawing on past experiences, funny commercials, a badly garbled comment that was far more interesting than if I'd heard it correctly. (Look at those condos they are building? Oh! I thought you said look at those condors on that building!) or simply wondering about the all abiding, "what would happen if . . ." I can't take the deception anymore, and feel I have to cut to the chase and give it to you straight.
I have a cabinet of awesomeness that spawns ideas like clockwork.
My cabinet doesn't look very special on the outside, sitting within my arms reach and disguised as a normal, everyday cabinet. I have even put mundane things into it to help hide its true function of supplying ideas when there are none, and it has color coded files and matching paperclips, my passport, contracts, and Meyer-Briggs personality profiles. There is a lovely horizontal surface to it, and so, to further the deception, I've put my phone and internet connection blinking like a sentry atop it, my industrial stapler and sticky-note dispenser acting as a vanguard.
Like a golden duck, magical things happen inside, with papers building up, spawning, growing, until every so often, usually at the dead of winter, it reaches capacity and I have to open it up and pull out a chunk, sending it off to NY for them to put in their cabinet of awesomeness where it ferments and grows some more until they finally, desperately, chop it up into book-size pieces to get rid of it, sending it out into the world and hoping by division and dilution they managed to kill the monster.
Sometimes, though, a tiny bit of idea wedges into someone else, someone who lets it grow and develop into something new, something awesome. That's the best feeling of all.
Funny thing about my cabinet of awesomeness though. Just like a magic duck, I have to put stuff in there before I can take it out. . . -grin-
