Brilliant Idea

 

Saturday morning, I was making Kiki breakfast. I stood at the stove, moving the scrambled eggs in the pan, and looked at a plate of peanut butter chocolate chip cookies I made the night before. I took a sip of coffee and thought of how well the two would go together; the cookie and the coffee: the series bite, sip, bite, sip.

These were cookies I made after watching a reel my sister sent me, of a foul-mouthed lady aggressively giving the recipe for her world-famous flourless cookies. They are equal parts sugar and peanut butter, with an egg, a splash of vanilla and a bag of chocolate chips. It was the sugar content that had me questioning my desire.

I knew if I ate the cookie, I would feel like shit. I don’t have the stomach I once did, and eating a cookie with the sugar content of a can of Coca-Cola would leave me with a stomach ache.

I ate the cookie, and then I ate another one.

After I brought my daughter her normal breakfast of eggs and sourdough toast, I lay on the couch, waiting for the corrupting backlash. It was significant, compounded by the six cookies I had eaten the night before.

This day was meant to be a writing day, and I intentionally withdrew myself from the game by giving myself a wretched stomach ache.

Around noon, I figured, I would lay back and close my eyes to try and think about the story I’m working on. I had binaural beats playing on Spotify and because I’m too cheap to pay for the membership, I deal with advertisements.

Listening to the same ads over and over is annoying. Sometimes I listen to an ad for toilet paper and the next ad will be for a different brand of toilet paper. I have the ads memorized, but I use them as goalposts at the gym. I’ll say, “Go at the fastest pace for the length of three commercials.”

But as I laid down, the ads served a different purpose. I love how Thomas Edison would sit in his rocking chair with a silver spoon in his hand. His goal was to get into the state of mind right before drifting off to sleep. The mind goes somewhere we don’t see when awake. He wanted to go there because it was when he had eureka moments, and ideas came to him that he couldn’t access after prompting the mind, “Give me something great to work with.” 

So as he rests, he starts to drift off to sleep, the muscles in his hand relax, the silver spoon drops, and he’s brought back to being fully aware. Well, Spotify ads are the silver spoon. I laid back and enjoyed the wonderful time traveling to my dream brain, but right as I was about to power down the brain and sleep, the Spotify ad and its out-of-place, increased volume, jingle intro would pull me back to fully awake.

I didn’t have a brilliant idea. The blog I wrote afterward went into the computer garbage can because it wasn’t funny. 

Actually, I had one brilliant idea. I went into the kitchen, saw the last two cookies on the plate, and ate them. I’d already wasted my day, and I wouldn't waste another.