Christmas Lightbulb

I usually go with whatever scant natural light is in a room.

I'll be sitting in that naturally lit room when someone else will enter the room and turn on the Edison light, sometimes that someone else will have this observation/suggestion..."It's dark in here why don't you turn on the goddamned light."

Whenver that happens, I feel a jolt. 

I had no idea that the room was dark.

The room looked fine to me.

So when the light suddenly goes on, I sometimes think that I have an idea.

I start looking for an angle.

Then I realize, it was no idea....just somebody turning on a light.

The new light over powers the natural light and changes the focus.

Let's change focus.

Once long ago during one of his press conferences somebody asked Bob Dylan for advice. Dylan said "always carry a light bulb with you" and for the next few months Bob carried one around with him.

In the comics, a light bulb is shorthand for an idea.

Not all ideas are good ideas.

Sometimes a person speaks without thinking, carried away by intuition and logic in an attempt to "tell it like it is". Such people regard themselves as folks who say what everybody else is thinking but are afraid to say. Often their outburst, confidently expressed is taken for truth. Rarely is it true.

In college, we had endless bull sessions in which this phenomena occurred over and over again. We learned to recognize such outbursts as the imaginary conclusions and non-sequiturs that were usually based on bad information, miscalculation and poor filtering.

Someone might suggest, like Malcolm Gladwell or Thornton Krell, that Paul Simon is the most influential recording artist of the last 50 years. Because Gladwell or Krell is a walking idea machine, many people will go along with the equation...but not everybody.

When we heard somebody come up with such an arguable certainity, we would put our fist on our head imitating a light bulb and point at the Gladwell or the Krell or Wild Bill or Doogie or Cat or whomever had been so sure of themselves as we indicated that whatever they had just said was imaginary and in need of clarification and/or contradiction.

Not exactly a lie....not exactly bullshit but not exactly wise or true.

"That was a bulb, Doog!"

Very often when a person was coming to thier faulty conclusion, we listeners would start to slowly raise our fists towards the top of our head giving the speaker a chance to straighten out his/her statement before the fist plant and the finger point indicating an official declaration of disbelief.

Of course, we could give a lightbulb to ourselves. Yesterday for example in my betting in the NFL, I made certain assumptions about the outcome of several games that proved to be totally imaginary.

"I gotta give myself a bulb on the Eagles game yesterday."

Sometimes when you give yoursel a bulb, somebody else is likely to say "yeah, I had the same bulb."

I've been wanting to write about lightbulbs for quite awhile but the idea was always dim and without angle.

Then today, on Christmas morning, a light went on.

I thought at first that Lynn had turned on the light in my office but now I know different.

It was an idea with an angle and I got it naturally.

A gift.

I hope it's no bulb.