The Idea Gnomes
Oct. 19th, 2011 11:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hwrnmnbsolI find that when I'm short on ideas, it's good to write about being short on ideas.
I sat down at the computer to write a little after ten o'clock. I restarted my machine and got a new file opened up, a virtual blank sheet of paper in front of me. I knew what I was going to write; the idea had occurred to me in the shower that morning, and I knew it was going to be a good one. I cracked my knuckles and prepared to type. Just then the doorbell rang.
It was some kind of magazine salesman; I didn't even listen hard enough to know what he wanted me to buy. I got rid of him as fast as possible, then returned to the computer. I sat down and stared at the blank screen, trying to organize my thoughts. What had I been planning to write about? The distraction of the unwelcome visitor had thrown me off stride; I struggled to recapture the substance of the idea I had conceived only hours earlier. The idea eluded me. I closed my eyes, batted my temples with my hands, stuck my head under running water in the kitchen sink. Nothing.
The idea was gone.
Fuming, I went into the kitchen to get another cup of coffee. I heard a thump and a rattle from the breakfast room as I turned on the light. Thinking that one of the neighborhood cats had gotten in a window again, I peered through the doorway.
There was a stranger in my breakfast room. He was squat and dark, and he wore a black trenchcoat and porkpie hat. He was straddling the windowsill, with one foot outside in the alley. Our eyes met. His were narrowed with guilt and hostility.
"Hey!" I said.
The little man twisted around, throwing his other leg out the window, and he wriggled to slide down on top of the trashcans. As he turned I saw something under his arm – something blue and glowing. It's hard to describe what it was , but it looked conceptual, somehow, and familiar. In that moment I knew that the intruder was making off with my story idea.
I ran to the window. The man had rolled off the trashcans and was hustling down the alley, his little legs chugging along as fast as he could go.
"STOP THIEF!" I shouted. "Come back with my goddamn idea!"
I'm no marathoner but I try to stay in shape. I knew I could catch the burglar despite his head start, if for no reason other than my longer stride. And I damned sure wanted to make a try for it, because I found the notion of somebody boldly stealing my ideas, from my own home during daylight hours, offensive in the extreme! I grabbed the top of the windowsill and swung myself out over the alley. I dropped onto the trashcans, caving in the lids in the process, and jumped down to the cracked asphalt paving.
I had on my sweats and good tennis shoes – a better wardrobe choice for a run than blocky black shoes with spats, like the thief had to deal with. I set off down the alley at a quick pace, one or two speeds below a sprint, something I could sustain for a while. I could see the burglar at the mouth of the alley. He dithered in a panic as he realized I was after him, then darted off to the left. Even a hundred feet away I could tell his steps were fueled by fear. Good, I thought.
I faded to the right side of the alley, arms pumping, and took the corner wide. I almost bowled over a roughly-used man pushing a shopping cart full of cans; he shouted wildly and incoherently after me as I brushed past him. At that hour the sidewalks were mostly empty, and I could see the dark little fellow ahead of me, but not too far – already I had closed the gap. He huffed and puffed with the glittering blue package of my idea tucked under his arm like a football.
"STOP HIM!" I shouted. An old man and two teenagers on bicycles curiously watched us both go by but didn't do anything to stop the thief. I was only fifty feet behind him when he skittered around the corner at Franklin Street, heading towards City Hall and the mall beyond that.
I took the corner wide again. Just as I rounded onto Franklin, something blue exploded in my face. My pace slacked off while I rubbed the stars out of my eyes. My vision cleared, and I could still see the little man in black ahead of me chugging down the sidewalk.
The absurdity of the situation struck me. I was doing – what? chasing after somebody who was carrying an idea? You can't carry an idea; clearly it was something else he had. What was I going to do when I caught him, accuse him of stealing something ephemeral, and something I couldn't prove ownership of anyway? Running after that guy was the dumbest idea I ever had.
And then, as I considered giving up the chase, it hit me: quitting wasn't my idea. That was the blue stuff I had just seen; the little man had thrown a defeatist idea at me, trying to get me to stop. Chasing him *was* ridiculous, yes – but stopping would be even stranger. I shook off the foreign idea and redoubled my efforts.
The burglar risked a glance over his shoulder and saw me gaining on him. He yelped and tossed little blue sparkling nuggets over his shoulder as he ran. I was ready for them now, though, and I eluded them easily as they bounced off the concrete walk. They were little ideas, I could tell that much as they flew by. One of them looked like an emergency phone call that I would have remembered I needed to make. Another had the rough shape of an urgent need to go to the bathroom. The panicky little thief was very free flinging other peoples' ideas around as I caught up to him, I noticed, but he held onto my story idea as if his life depended on it.
He was only a dozen yards ahead of me when he hit the steps to the public library. These slowed him down tremendously, owing to his short stature, and as he crept up them I closed the gap. I took the steps three at a time and caught up to the perp just as he was going through the revolving door.
I reached through the gap with both arms and caught him, one hand seizing the thief by the back of his trenchcoat collar; the other fumbling with the brim of his hat. He yelped as I caught him, but the turnstile closed on my arms, keeping me from getting to him. He was trapped, there in the twilight of the revolving door, with no way forward and no way back.
Out of nowhere – a black fog bank? A thick mist? – hands reached out to grab the idea-napper. They pulled him free of my grasp, and although the revolving door turnstile didn't move, the thief disappeared into the miasma. I still had his porkpie in my hand; I pulled my arms gingerly out of the turnstile and pushed my way in to the library.
There was no sign of the little man or his abettors. The library was quiet, with somebody stamping books at the information desk, and two college students reading microfiche. There was nobody in a trenchcoat and no sign of where anybody could have quickly escaped to. It was as if the little man had simply disappeared.
I looked at the porkpie hat in my hands. Nobody wore things like that. Was it an eccentric criminal's accessory, or a badge of some sort of office, or something else entirely? Playing a hunch, I put the hat on my own head and went back through the revolving door. When I came out, I wasn't inside the library, and I wasn't outside the library. I was someplace else.
I was in a high vaulted room with arched stonework and no windows. Something about the place suggested it was deep underground; large torches lined the walls, illuminated the place with a flickering orange radiance.
The place was huge, and full of little men in black, all similar to the person I had been chasing. They were moving around the place and working with spheres and lozenges and prisms of electric blue – ideas, every one of them. There were thousands of ideas around the place, some big, some small, and of all different shapes and categories. The gnomes were sorting the ideas, labeling them, wittering over them with each other and discussing their relative merits.
Close by was a knot of the men, and I realized that the hatless one was the fellow I had been pursuing. He didn't look scared anymore; he looked embarrassed and angry. Despite the fact that he still had my pilfered idea under his arm, he had the nerve to step boldly up to me and affix me with an accusatory finger.
"You, there!" he trumpeted. "Give me back my thinking cap! That's not yours!"
"Yeah, well, give me back my idea!" I retorted.
"You don't need it!" he replied hotly.
One of the other gnomes stepped forwards. "Now, now," he said placatingly. "I think we can settle this like reasonable men. Here, Stiggles, give the man back his idea." Stiggles hemmed and hawed, but eventually he handed the blue bundle back to me, in as surly a manner as you could imagine. I held it in my hands, and as I did so it shrank and disappeared. Suddenly it was in my mind again, the thing I had been preparing to write about.
"My name is Cobwob," said the new gnome. "We're not thieves, we're actually philanthropists. It's our mission to save ideas, to share them with people who have none."
"He," I said, pointing at Stiggles, "took my idea just as I was about to use it. I was just sitting down to write with it!"
"You have jillions of ideas!" Stiggles spat back. "And you waste them, all the time! Just yesterday you had five good ideas, FIVE of them. And what did you do with them?"
I hadn't written the day before. "Nothing, I guess," I said.
"You've forgotten all about them, haven't you?" Stiggles accused. "Five perfectly decent ideas, just GONE." He snapped his fingers.
"Well, I'm sorry," I said, uncertain why I should feel so defensive over something so absurd. "Some days I just don't write, and then…"
"Oh, that's how it always is with the idea-rich," sneered Stiggles. "Always making excuses. Listen, while you're sitting around drunk on ideas, pissing them away like they're water, there are millions of children in Russia who have NO IDEAS AT ALL. There's a guy in Stockholm who has never had an original idea in his entire life. And here we stand dickering over some throwaway idea that you couldn’t really give two shits about! If you lost that idea, you could come up with another one within the hour and you'd be none the poorer! Meanwhile, if we faceted this one idea, divvied it up along lines of cleavage, we could go into a single village in Romania…"
Cobwob held up a hand for silence. "I'm sure he doesn't want to hear the details of what we do here, Stiggles," he said patiently. "Sir, I'm sorry if Stiggles was a little too enthusiastic in pursuit of our mission. But you must understand, his heart was in the right place. We, the Idea Men, gather wasted and unused ideas, cull and package them, and distribute them to Idea Banks around the world. We have provided the dull and unoriginal with millions of notions, fancies and creative sparks this year alone. Now, with Christmas approaching, we have a need to increase capacity so that nobody comes up short during the holidays. Stiggles was just trying to meet quota, sir. If I could just ask you to let us have the Thinking Cap back, then we can show you the door, and I'll promise you we'll never bother you again."
I took the hat off. I was about to hand it back when I paused. "Now, just a moment," I said.
**
Long story short, I volunteer with the Idea Men on Fridays. Stiggles was right; I usually have way more ideas than I need, and I'm glad to give up a few for a good cause. But I don't just donate my ideas; like most charities, what the Idea Men really need is the time and energy of a few dedicated people. I'm glad to provide some of that for a good cause too.
I have my own hat and trenchcoat. I'm a lot smaller when I wear them; it has something to do with ideas occurring to people stealthily. I work the retirement communities most of the time. Just last Friday I stole into the recreation hall of the Olive Hepper Group Home and found Sylvia staring as usual, just staring at the oil painting above the fireplace with the two daisies in a vase. Sylvia spent a lot of time staring at that painting.
I slipped behind her chair without attracting any attention. A moment later I was in the doorway, but not before something blue and formless passed between us. There was a kind of shimmering in Sylvia's eyes, and her gaze upon the two flowers in the painting took on a new sort of clarity – not an empty stare, but an understanding, the workings of a machine in use.
"I could," Sylvia whispered to herself, her eyes widening. "Yes."
Oh, it warms the heart.
I sat down at the computer to write a little after ten o'clock. I restarted my machine and got a new file opened up, a virtual blank sheet of paper in front of me. I knew what I was going to write; the idea had occurred to me in the shower that morning, and I knew it was going to be a good one. I cracked my knuckles and prepared to type. Just then the doorbell rang.
It was some kind of magazine salesman; I didn't even listen hard enough to know what he wanted me to buy. I got rid of him as fast as possible, then returned to the computer. I sat down and stared at the blank screen, trying to organize my thoughts. What had I been planning to write about? The distraction of the unwelcome visitor had thrown me off stride; I struggled to recapture the substance of the idea I had conceived only hours earlier. The idea eluded me. I closed my eyes, batted my temples with my hands, stuck my head under running water in the kitchen sink. Nothing.
The idea was gone.
Fuming, I went into the kitchen to get another cup of coffee. I heard a thump and a rattle from the breakfast room as I turned on the light. Thinking that one of the neighborhood cats had gotten in a window again, I peered through the doorway.
There was a stranger in my breakfast room. He was squat and dark, and he wore a black trenchcoat and porkpie hat. He was straddling the windowsill, with one foot outside in the alley. Our eyes met. His were narrowed with guilt and hostility.
"Hey!" I said.
The little man twisted around, throwing his other leg out the window, and he wriggled to slide down on top of the trashcans. As he turned I saw something under his arm – something blue and glowing. It's hard to describe what it was , but it looked conceptual, somehow, and familiar. In that moment I knew that the intruder was making off with my story idea.
I ran to the window. The man had rolled off the trashcans and was hustling down the alley, his little legs chugging along as fast as he could go.
"STOP THIEF!" I shouted. "Come back with my goddamn idea!"
I'm no marathoner but I try to stay in shape. I knew I could catch the burglar despite his head start, if for no reason other than my longer stride. And I damned sure wanted to make a try for it, because I found the notion of somebody boldly stealing my ideas, from my own home during daylight hours, offensive in the extreme! I grabbed the top of the windowsill and swung myself out over the alley. I dropped onto the trashcans, caving in the lids in the process, and jumped down to the cracked asphalt paving.
I had on my sweats and good tennis shoes – a better wardrobe choice for a run than blocky black shoes with spats, like the thief had to deal with. I set off down the alley at a quick pace, one or two speeds below a sprint, something I could sustain for a while. I could see the burglar at the mouth of the alley. He dithered in a panic as he realized I was after him, then darted off to the left. Even a hundred feet away I could tell his steps were fueled by fear. Good, I thought.
I faded to the right side of the alley, arms pumping, and took the corner wide. I almost bowled over a roughly-used man pushing a shopping cart full of cans; he shouted wildly and incoherently after me as I brushed past him. At that hour the sidewalks were mostly empty, and I could see the dark little fellow ahead of me, but not too far – already I had closed the gap. He huffed and puffed with the glittering blue package of my idea tucked under his arm like a football.
"STOP HIM!" I shouted. An old man and two teenagers on bicycles curiously watched us both go by but didn't do anything to stop the thief. I was only fifty feet behind him when he skittered around the corner at Franklin Street, heading towards City Hall and the mall beyond that.
I took the corner wide again. Just as I rounded onto Franklin, something blue exploded in my face. My pace slacked off while I rubbed the stars out of my eyes. My vision cleared, and I could still see the little man in black ahead of me chugging down the sidewalk.
The absurdity of the situation struck me. I was doing – what? chasing after somebody who was carrying an idea? You can't carry an idea; clearly it was something else he had. What was I going to do when I caught him, accuse him of stealing something ephemeral, and something I couldn't prove ownership of anyway? Running after that guy was the dumbest idea I ever had.
And then, as I considered giving up the chase, it hit me: quitting wasn't my idea. That was the blue stuff I had just seen; the little man had thrown a defeatist idea at me, trying to get me to stop. Chasing him *was* ridiculous, yes – but stopping would be even stranger. I shook off the foreign idea and redoubled my efforts.
The burglar risked a glance over his shoulder and saw me gaining on him. He yelped and tossed little blue sparkling nuggets over his shoulder as he ran. I was ready for them now, though, and I eluded them easily as they bounced off the concrete walk. They were little ideas, I could tell that much as they flew by. One of them looked like an emergency phone call that I would have remembered I needed to make. Another had the rough shape of an urgent need to go to the bathroom. The panicky little thief was very free flinging other peoples' ideas around as I caught up to him, I noticed, but he held onto my story idea as if his life depended on it.
He was only a dozen yards ahead of me when he hit the steps to the public library. These slowed him down tremendously, owing to his short stature, and as he crept up them I closed the gap. I took the steps three at a time and caught up to the perp just as he was going through the revolving door.
I reached through the gap with both arms and caught him, one hand seizing the thief by the back of his trenchcoat collar; the other fumbling with the brim of his hat. He yelped as I caught him, but the turnstile closed on my arms, keeping me from getting to him. He was trapped, there in the twilight of the revolving door, with no way forward and no way back.
Out of nowhere – a black fog bank? A thick mist? – hands reached out to grab the idea-napper. They pulled him free of my grasp, and although the revolving door turnstile didn't move, the thief disappeared into the miasma. I still had his porkpie in my hand; I pulled my arms gingerly out of the turnstile and pushed my way in to the library.
There was no sign of the little man or his abettors. The library was quiet, with somebody stamping books at the information desk, and two college students reading microfiche. There was nobody in a trenchcoat and no sign of where anybody could have quickly escaped to. It was as if the little man had simply disappeared.
I looked at the porkpie hat in my hands. Nobody wore things like that. Was it an eccentric criminal's accessory, or a badge of some sort of office, or something else entirely? Playing a hunch, I put the hat on my own head and went back through the revolving door. When I came out, I wasn't inside the library, and I wasn't outside the library. I was someplace else.
I was in a high vaulted room with arched stonework and no windows. Something about the place suggested it was deep underground; large torches lined the walls, illuminated the place with a flickering orange radiance.
The place was huge, and full of little men in black, all similar to the person I had been chasing. They were moving around the place and working with spheres and lozenges and prisms of electric blue – ideas, every one of them. There were thousands of ideas around the place, some big, some small, and of all different shapes and categories. The gnomes were sorting the ideas, labeling them, wittering over them with each other and discussing their relative merits.
Close by was a knot of the men, and I realized that the hatless one was the fellow I had been pursuing. He didn't look scared anymore; he looked embarrassed and angry. Despite the fact that he still had my pilfered idea under his arm, he had the nerve to step boldly up to me and affix me with an accusatory finger.
"You, there!" he trumpeted. "Give me back my thinking cap! That's not yours!"
"Yeah, well, give me back my idea!" I retorted.
"You don't need it!" he replied hotly.
One of the other gnomes stepped forwards. "Now, now," he said placatingly. "I think we can settle this like reasonable men. Here, Stiggles, give the man back his idea." Stiggles hemmed and hawed, but eventually he handed the blue bundle back to me, in as surly a manner as you could imagine. I held it in my hands, and as I did so it shrank and disappeared. Suddenly it was in my mind again, the thing I had been preparing to write about.
"My name is Cobwob," said the new gnome. "We're not thieves, we're actually philanthropists. It's our mission to save ideas, to share them with people who have none."
"He," I said, pointing at Stiggles, "took my idea just as I was about to use it. I was just sitting down to write with it!"
"You have jillions of ideas!" Stiggles spat back. "And you waste them, all the time! Just yesterday you had five good ideas, FIVE of them. And what did you do with them?"
I hadn't written the day before. "Nothing, I guess," I said.
"You've forgotten all about them, haven't you?" Stiggles accused. "Five perfectly decent ideas, just GONE." He snapped his fingers.
"Well, I'm sorry," I said, uncertain why I should feel so defensive over something so absurd. "Some days I just don't write, and then…"
"Oh, that's how it always is with the idea-rich," sneered Stiggles. "Always making excuses. Listen, while you're sitting around drunk on ideas, pissing them away like they're water, there are millions of children in Russia who have NO IDEAS AT ALL. There's a guy in Stockholm who has never had an original idea in his entire life. And here we stand dickering over some throwaway idea that you couldn’t really give two shits about! If you lost that idea, you could come up with another one within the hour and you'd be none the poorer! Meanwhile, if we faceted this one idea, divvied it up along lines of cleavage, we could go into a single village in Romania…"
Cobwob held up a hand for silence. "I'm sure he doesn't want to hear the details of what we do here, Stiggles," he said patiently. "Sir, I'm sorry if Stiggles was a little too enthusiastic in pursuit of our mission. But you must understand, his heart was in the right place. We, the Idea Men, gather wasted and unused ideas, cull and package them, and distribute them to Idea Banks around the world. We have provided the dull and unoriginal with millions of notions, fancies and creative sparks this year alone. Now, with Christmas approaching, we have a need to increase capacity so that nobody comes up short during the holidays. Stiggles was just trying to meet quota, sir. If I could just ask you to let us have the Thinking Cap back, then we can show you the door, and I'll promise you we'll never bother you again."
I took the hat off. I was about to hand it back when I paused. "Now, just a moment," I said.
**
Long story short, I volunteer with the Idea Men on Fridays. Stiggles was right; I usually have way more ideas than I need, and I'm glad to give up a few for a good cause. But I don't just donate my ideas; like most charities, what the Idea Men really need is the time and energy of a few dedicated people. I'm glad to provide some of that for a good cause too.
I have my own hat and trenchcoat. I'm a lot smaller when I wear them; it has something to do with ideas occurring to people stealthily. I work the retirement communities most of the time. Just last Friday I stole into the recreation hall of the Olive Hepper Group Home and found Sylvia staring as usual, just staring at the oil painting above the fireplace with the two daisies in a vase. Sylvia spent a lot of time staring at that painting.
I slipped behind her chair without attracting any attention. A moment later I was in the doorway, but not before something blue and formless passed between us. There was a kind of shimmering in Sylvia's eyes, and her gaze upon the two flowers in the painting took on a new sort of clarity – not an empty stare, but an understanding, the workings of a machine in use.
"I could," Sylvia whispered to herself, her eyes widening. "Yes."
Oh, it warms the heart.
