Danger Brooks

4.21.00

Idea Men

Anyway, we would come up with an idea for something, and then if it turned out to be popular it would happen. For example, one of my very early ideas, the one that made me employee of the month. Are you ready for this? Okay, here it goes: Birds fly around, up in the sky.

It’s good, isn’t it? What? You don’t believe that that was my idea? Well how do you think they got up there? Birds don’t just appear out of nowhere, you know. Much less up in the sky, flying around like they’re, I dunno, birds or something. Somebody had to have that idea. That was me.

Birds fly around, up in the sky was idea #4687702. Leonardo daVinci came up with the idea of numbering our ideas so we could keep track of them. That was back when we only had like four ideas, and three of them were me, Joe and him, so nobody really thought that we needed a catologuing system. But Leo was convinced, so he went to work on it. Idea #1 was the number one, which he used in his cataloguing system to mark the first idea he came up with since implementing the number designation method, that idea being the aforementioned number one. I know, it’s confusing as Christ in a French maid outfit. Idea #2 was the number two. Idea #3 was the number three, and so on up until Idea #674, when Joe pointed out that Leo was getting nowhere. Idea #675 was the numbers 675 through a million skillion bazillion, which was how many ideas me and Joe and Leonardo daVinci figured we could come up with before we called it quits.

Boy, we thought up some good ones, too. Idea #743: When there is light around, you can see stuff. That one was great. A lot of people chalk that idea up to scientists, on account of they studied the eye and what happens if you spray nail polish remover on a volunteer gypsy kid’s optic nerve and stuff. But it was all us. See idea #96654332: Scientists will think they are clever, but they are not. Still other people chalk the light thing up to God, which is also total steaming bullshit, on account of the aforementioned science disproved his existence. Idea #8789253: Science will be developed, by a bunch of people so ugly they could not possibly believe in God.

You know what always amazed me? Certain terrible ideas – ones we never thought would fly – wound up being really popular. For example Idea #8365984638239: Joe DiMaggio gets bone spurs and can’t play baseball anymore. Leo came up with that one, and when he told us about it I laughed so hard a lump of moose feces in the shape of Copernicus came out of Joe’s nose. (That was the result of an office prank. Idea #7956068881: Every time I laugh, a lump of moose feces in the shape of Copernicus comes out of Joe’s nose.) We never thought it would fly. I mean, DiMaggio. One of the best-loved players in the sport, a man known for his unwavering devotion to playing every game, felled by bone spurs. But it took off, and low and behold, it happened. My idea was, in the middle of Game Six of the Yankees/Red Sox World Series, Joe DiMaggio’s face blows up. He’s just standing there at home plate and BLAMMO! a perfectly smooth, slightly smoking featureless stretch of skin where his face used to be. But he wants to finish the inning, right? So he climbs up into the Yankee Doodles Junior Fans section of the stadium and starts ripping the faces off kids and slapping them onto the space on his head where the skin used to be, and they stick there on account of all the blood and strands of brain integument and whatnot. But the thing is, DiMaggio is a grown man, and one with an unusually large head at that, so all of the faces are too small for him. And in desperation he keeps ripping off face after face and slapping them onto himself, until eventually his head is like this cone made out of his bare skull and a gradually tapering stack of about forty faces. Then he goes back to home plate, hits a grand slam, and dies from a severe case of his face just blew up about ten minutes ago. I thought people would love that, but in the end Leo’s idea won out. What can you do?

You know what the best idea we ever came up with was? Idea #9804: The moon. That was the rough draft. The finished product was "The moon, up in the sky." It was later updated in Idea #6578832: The moon, out in space. The best part about it was it generated all sorts of spinoff ideas: Old British people write boring poems about the moon, certain guys turn into werewolves when they look at the moon, total hardasses wrap themselves in tinfoil and jump up and down on the moon. It was great. Granted, some of the spinoff ideas weren’t very popular; Mussolini catches the moon with an atomic fishing rod never really took off, and neither did my personal favorite, a second moon appears out of nowhere and sodomizes the first one. I could not figure out why people wouldn’t want to see that.

Anyway, I think we all sort of knew that the moon was our last really good idea, because once we had exhausted the spinoffs we started to get tired of the whole idea business. After Idea #10395737266: Man decides to put a cool space colony on the moon, later, and therefore stops romanticizing it entirely, the bulk of our time was spent trying to come up with ways we could take some time off. DaVinci scored big with Idea #143763765858: Leonardo DaVinci is born in Renaissance Italy, and got about seventy years’ vacation, right there. Then Joe and I came up with Idea #143763765859: Leonardo DaVinci dies after about seventy years and doesn’t get to come back to his job as an idea man. It was partly out of jealousy and partly because we wanted the desk space.

Maybe Leo was a stabilizing influence in the office, because shortly after we got rid of him Joe left, too. It turned out he was just the janitor. I’m not sure how his ruse was uncovered, but I suspect it had something to do with Idea #1463836294847464: Joe turns out to be just the janitor, which I wrote while he was using the bathroom. I was pissed because he ate my bagel.

It was there, alone in the office except for Joe who was busy trying to scrub the Copernicus-shaped feces stains out of the carpet, that I came up with my last idea. I called it Idea #0, partially because it was so important and partially because fuck Leo, and it went as follows. Idea #0: Everybody has to come up with their own ideas from now on. Then I locked up and I went home.

The reason I tell you people all of this is because of Idea #14683729475837847. Idea #14683729475837847: Dan Brooks is born. He grows up, falls in love about a thousand times, breaks his nose, has a few ideas, and dies. I thought you’d get a kick out of hearing the number on account of you know him.

Hunh. He’s no moon.