Idea Tremors: Waiting to Quake
A meditation on why you should memorialize your half-baked idea quakes.
Note: The Podcast audio is at the end of the story.🫡
A jolt—a sensual, unsettling shift in the world—shoves your brain into a heightened state of awareness. Is this...? The picture frame on the wall above your bed rattles its bones, and the dog in the apartment next door begins to bark. You wait as the rumble passes. Was that…? The menacing Earth-sigh beneath your feet on this Californian night becomes a sinister breath in your ear: “You control nothing,” it whispers. “You are nothing. I could end you right now.” You brush the voice aside. Normality restored, your first response is always to wonder: “Did anyone else feel that?” It was the low-grade tremor, thrilling in the danger of its potential. Nature’s equivalent of the half-baked idea.
A thought tremor arrives fresh and innocent, wet with the moist sheen of possibility. It is a micro-quake, rippling along the cluttered hallways of your brain and rattling all your “look at me!” glory plates. As an Ideamologist—one who adheres to the methodology—you study this new thought intently. Measure the strength of it. Does this idea scare or excite you? Will it crack the world wide open or alter the coastline of a continent? Or is it nothing? You have a duty of care in this moment—it is the Ideamologist’s code.
First, gently take the idea into your cupped hands, as though holding a soft and trembling bird that has struck your consciousness window and is momentarily stunned. Be very still as you observe. Get in close. Breathe in. Now ask yourself: “Is this something?”
Look harder. “Is this something?” Is this the diving board, or do you have the whole pool? Look at it from another angle. Perhaps this is that one kid who won’t get in the water but has the potential to be the world’s greatest cannonballer? Hmmm. “This might be something.”
Your next obligation is to begin to feed this thought to see if it will grow. Will legs sprout from its blobby body? Will it morph and contort and evolve into something spectacular? Timing is everything here and sometimes, just like a Tamagotchi, your precious something can suddenly, unexpectedly, and rather depressingly, die. That’s where the Idea Graveyard comes in.
Ideas die. Even the ones you thought were brilliant in their first, flashing moments of hot life. But just because they couldn’t sustain their tremor and fizzled out, you shouldn’t discard them like an old pizza box. Don’t act like they didn’t mean anything to you. Like that failed idea was just some brain fart that you never liked the smell of anyway. No. I believe you should put those dead ideas to rest in a location where they can be easily visited and remembered.
Memorialize the low-grade tremors and honor their contributions to your thought process. Every brain expedition that sets out to solve or explore a creative problem—even when the idea trips and falls down a ravine, which is also a solve—is an evolution of your ideating self. Plus, you never know when a visit with a deceased idea might set off some unexpected aftershocks. You just never know.
It should come as no surprise, given my penchant for excessive accumulation of notebooks, that I have kept every dumb idea I’ve ever scribbled down. I can always go sit with my dead, remembering our time together. The dumb ones. The mutants and ugly beasts. The too-cutes, not-quite-theres, and never-readys. They’re always there to be stumbled upon, re-igniting their dreams of exhumation.
An Idea Graveyard can be a notebook filled with dead ideas, a folder on your computer (I have one called The Dead Zone), or even a simple system of signposting your drabbles in a sea of other drabbles, just so you know where all your idea bodies are buried. (Me again: I draw little lightbulbs next to random thoughts in my notebooks so when flipping through I can find them easily.)
That’s it. That’s my pitch. Do not discard your idea tremors, those mighty little battlers who viciously shake but do not quite crack the crust. Eulogize them so you can move on, then bury them somewhere you can visit. But not too deep. For even in their repose, little tremors have value. While writing this, I flipped through a three-year-old journal and found the words “Cormaculate Conception”1 scribbled next to a hand-drawn lightbulb. I smiled. It is not something, it is nothing. A dumb idea with no legs beyond the name2, but man, it makes me laugh. It makes me laugh and it reminds me of this: I may not ever get the Great Quake idea, but I sure do get a lot of tremors.
Never take an idea for granted. Write, record, sketch, dictate—just have a way to capture even the dumbest idea and all the work you put towards it. It might be something or it might end up being nothing—use your Ideamologist3 Methodology to find out. And when an idea dies, take that grief and build a glorious monument to your creativity and inventiveness with your very own Idea Graveyard4. Because even Tamagotchi’s got graveyards.
Yours in tiny thought,
Janeen
This Week’s Amends…
"Real wealth is never having to spend time with assholes.”
- John Waters
John Waters had a birthday last week. John Waters knows what he likes. John Waters, lover of trashy things, can also be somewhat of a notable quotable. There are plenty of interviews out there on the YouTubers with him, and a 1998 documentary called “Divine Trash”5, but as a bonus ear amends to hold hands with this writing amends, WTF posted an interview with him last week (on his 75th birthday), so I encourage you to take that one out for a walk.
Tina Turner is an absolute badass. The HBO Documentary “Tina” reminded me of this. She is the original. She is the best.6 Go watch if you can. But until then, here’s Proud Mary as performed on Italian TV in 1971. The Ikettes, y’all!
Via Open Culture (who break down the role of this song in Tina’s career and life a little at that link).
“The Broccoli Tree: A Parable” delivers some thoughts on what can be lost—and what can't be—when we share what we love.
While I’m a little disappointed that there’s no comparison of an asteroid next to the Big Merino, this is still impressive. It shows some real asteroids, with some fake ones mixed in, and how they compare in size. Big is not a big enough word. Biggerer and biggittybiggerer?
Via Boing Boing
Did any of this spark a tiny thought of your own?
One episode would be about this paragraph. Then this one. There. That’s two episodes. Yeah, this idea is nothing.
If the fundamental work of a seismologist is to locate the source, nature, and the size (magnitude) of seismic events, the Ideamologist’s fundamental work is to… See. This was in idea tremor which did not make it past the middle of the sentence. To the graveyard with it!
Loved this graveyard of abandoned data visualizations by Erin Davis .
You can watch the whole documentary on YouTube. Side note: This quote is my all-time favorite from the Pope of Trash, John Waters. It’s about books.