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Frank Cotolo
July 22, 2012 |
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All of my best ideas come to me at night. By night I mean early morning, though it is still dark,
when most people who work business hours are asleep. I don't work business hours. I have a business
but my business hours are different from the usual business hours so I am usually away in the early
morning before the usual business hours.
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Maybe it is because everything is so quiet during the A.M. hours, unless there is an explosion near
to my house, which is rare because my house is surrounded by farmland, which is owned and operated
by farm people, and they never seem to use things like dynamite, no less in the early morning.
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But even if the farmers decided to blow things up after midnight, I would probably still get my
best ideas as debris flew through the fields and the echoes of the explosions shook the ground.
That's how strong are these ideas that come to me in the night.
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They are never full ideas, per se, they are thoughts; they begin as pieces of ideas, elements that
can develop into ideas. So many come that I have to write them down so that I can flesh them out
later, most likely during the daytime, during my business hours. Sometimes I wonder why complete
ideas don't come to me. It would be great if the whole kit and caboodle would arrive and do so in
order, the first part coming first, the middle coming next and the conclusion following the middle.
And if they could come like that and come like that slowly, I would be able to write down the entire
idea.
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However, it is not like that. My thoughts come uncoupled from their full entity. They spark like
electric shocks and then fade away. I would say that in a given amount of morning hours a dozen
thoughts could come to me and if I am lucky I can write half of them down. Then, if I am luckier I
can make sense of three of those six and then if I am the luckiest I can get I will complete one
thought into an idea.
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Though many thoughts slip away I find that every thought I develop into an idea turns out to be
something true, something honest in nature, something heroic in cause, something that can be
memorized if necessary and used in mixed company, maybe even in a speech or a lecture. It is as if
the night thoughts are the right thoughts, meaning that during the day I get a lot of wrong
thoughts, which is why I don't trust my day thoughts.
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Day thoughts don't even come that often and when they do they are usually uninteresting, like,
"I should go to the bathroom," and "Time to check the mailbox for today's mail," and, "Is that the
phone ringing and do I feel like talking to anyone?" Thoughts like that are impossible to make into
ideas. After all, most people go to the bathroom, check the mail and hear the phone when it rings
so what could be right about those ideas?
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This is why I think it best to spend a lot of day hours sleeping. That way when it becomes dark out
and it becomes late to others my mind can be free to shoot out thoughts like worms from a garden
hose. And they will begin to shoot out, these thoughts, because they seem to need to escape my
consciousness. It is as if these thoughts brew during the day and are ready to percolate at night
and fire through my brain like herds of wild geese gliding through plutonium clouds.
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In fact, I see it is dark out now so I will stop writing and begin receiving all of the right
thoughts, the new thoughts, the building-block thoughts, the foundation thoughts, the stuff of
which ideas are made.
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Besides, I think I hear the phone ringing and I should take the call.
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Cotolo can be found hosting the talk and interview programme
Cotolo
Chronicles. You can send him an e-mail at this address:
frank@148.ca.
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