THE CHICKEN IS NOT A LIE

I had a dream the other night that I died in an earthquake. I was on the tenth floor of a building, and it started shaking, and I thought, “Oh cool, the Big One is finally here!” But then the view out the window started changing and I was like, “Uh oh. Building’s falling over.” And then I died.

People say it’s boring when other people talk about their dreams. So, I’m sorry for boring you. BUT I wanted to tell you so that if I DID die in an earthquake, you could point at this news post and say, “Whoa. Freaky.”

And also, this: I feel that ideas come into your mind through a small, imaginary tube. And the tube is only one idea wide. Only one idea can flow through it at a time. And for days this idea of dying in an earthquake has been sitting at the end of my own tube. I didn’t think it was an interesting enough idea to actually turn into a news item, and so I just left it sitting at the end of the tube. But then I began to wonder—what if leaving that idea sitting there, clogging up the tube, means that no other ideas can come out? There might be a whole bunch of good ideas in there, stuck!

And I also wondered if you leave your idea tube jammed up like that for a long time, does the grand dispatcher of ideas re-route the idea traffic to other tubes? I sure hope not. Oh man. What if it’s too late?

So here I am, flushing out my idea tube. It feels really good. Maybe I should get them all out. Maybe I should purge the tube of all ideas that never made it on to the news page. Okay, let’s see…

Once, on the way home from work I saw a guy walking down the street wearing a cape that he made out of a towel that was printed with images from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. And I swear to god, this guy had a chicken on his head. Just sitting on top of his head, snuggled down into his bushy hair, as the man walked with long, stately strides. He was like the Chicken King of Sixth Street.

I never mentioned it because it sounds like the kind of thing that someone would make up. “I saw a guy with a chicken on his head!” It just sounds phony. But I swear it is true.

Oh, it feels good to get this out.

Here’s something else I never mentioned: When it rained really hard at our old offices, sometimes the downstairs toilet would overflow with raw human waste from the city sewers. I never put that on the news page, but that had more to do with recruiting purposes than with the idea tube.

(Our new bathrooms are awesome and have automatic soap dispensers and never overflow with human waste, just so you know.)

So, in summary: Death by Earthquake, Chicken King, Raw Sewage.

Now that that’s all out in the open, I’m sure some really awesome stuff’s going to happen.