Up in Ontario

The Bad-Idea Filter

Here's a proposition. We've all had those moments when something, say, an idea, has popped into our head. It feels like a surge of recognition, a charged jolt of potential. Perhaps we were in conversation with someone and something they said triggered the idea. Perhaps we were walking along the street, enroute to point x, when a billboard, a bird overhead, a passing car, made us think, what if...

We've all come up with bad ideas. And we all have a Bad-Idea Filter. At certain times the Bad-Idea Filter works, and at other times, to put it nicely, it does not. The porousness of the Bad-Idea Filter can be influenced by many things: emotion, context, rest (or lack thereof), etc. The list goes on. One of the most pronounced influencers of the Bad-Idea Filter is alcohol. When we drink, we don't think. How many times have we woken up the next morning and thought to ourselves, What was I thinking? The Bad-Idea Filter slipped.

That time we did aerobics on the boulevard of the freeway with nothing on save a sock covering our dangling modifier. Another time when we watched a friend fall into a campfire, pick himself up and dust himself off, and we noticed a tongue of flame on his shirttail and we thought to ourselves, Hmm, let's just see where that goes. The stupid things that we tell ourselves we've outgrown until the next time the Bad-Idea Filter slips and we're left explaining actions with nothing more to go with than, It seemed like a good idea at the time.

So what's your story? Comments, please.