When I was twenty I tried skateboarding with my eyes closed and fell down the flight of concrete stairs that leads up to the entrance of the quad. I blacked out and they took me to the hospital, and, since I was unconscious, the doctors figured out my name by rummaging through my wallet. Unfortunately for me, I did not have my driver's license in my wallet at the time. Instead, I had a fake ID. The doctors took the name the ID had on it - not my own - and, viewing hospital records, determined that I was someone who I was not. By some terrible twist of fate, this someone was not allergic to ketamine, a common anesthesia that I am actually extremely allergic to. I have a medical bracelet for it, in fact, but I never wear it.I don't know whether it was my body's reaction to the allergen or the surgery they performed on me or all of the alcohol I consumed at the party I went to an hour after I was released from the hospital on the grounds that I would get plenty of bed rest, but something inside me was changed. That night my roommate woke me, telling me I had been talking in my sleep.
"What was I saying?" I asked him.
"I dunno, man," he said, looking bewildered. "I thought I heard you say something about skydiving during a lightning storm."
The next two nights the same thing happened. I would open my eyes and he would be standing over me, telling me I had been muttering about juggling cats. It was at this point that it occurred to me he might have been playing a joke. The next evening I tape-recorded my sleep, and discovered, to my surprise, that I was not being lied to. I was chattering all night long about all sorts of nonsense: "wear sweatpants to a funeral," I said; or, "play russian roulette with a semi-automatic." Every night I kept talking, and every night I would suggest the same sort of things: bad ideas.
It was last year that I started marketing my mumblings, after a conversation with a cousin at Thanksgiving. He called to me from across the Thanksgiving table, "Hey, Mr. Bad-Idea-Man, should I carve the turkey now, or would that be unwise? Maybe you should take a nap and see."
I gave a sarcastic little chuckle as I folded my napkin onto my lap. "Real funny."
My aunt jumped to my defense. "I think your bad ideas are kind of neat," she said, talking to me but glaring at my cousin, "if I had bad ideas like yours, I'd write them all down so I knew what to avoid."
It was a few months after that that I started the Bad Idea Blog. The concept was simple enough: I recorded myself talking in my sleep during the night, typed it all up the next morning, and then sold access to my insights for $11.99 per year.
At first it was just my family that signed up, but it wasn't long before a few local media sources found out about it. A few catchy headlines later, NBC ran the story on a slow news day. There was an immediate spike in my number of readers, and when the surge finally receded I was left with a regular and reliable climb. I hit the hundred thousand mark a month and a half later and took a trip over Niagara Falls in a cardboard box to celebrate. My arm was broken on some rocks, but it was worth it. I was living the life of a king, and all I had to do to stay successful was sleep.
This was the story up until two days ago, when disaster struck. I was listening to the previous night's recording, typing up the bad ideas:
Buy an iPhone for your dog.
Wear a bluetooth in both of your ears.
Break up with your girlfriend via skywriter.
There was a pause here - I rolled over in my sleep, I think - and then, without warning:
Sell bad ideas.
I froze, and then I rewound the tape, hoping I had heard wrong.
Sell bad ideas.
It was unmistakable.
For a year I've sold bad ideas. I made 1.4 million dollars before expenses selling bad ideas to over a hundred thousand people from around the world. My bad idea was being eaten up by the public.
What about a week from now when I wake up and it turns out that bicameral legislatures are a bad idea? What about music? Is music a bad idea? Love? Peace? Democracy?
If you're finding this note, I am already dead. The world wasn't meant to have a bad idea man. Bad ideas should be found out on their own or not at all - selling bad ideas is simply a bad idea, and so I'm done here.
I'll look through the records. I'm sure I've come up with more than enough ways to kill myself.
