The other night I was laying in bed and right before I fell asleep I had this great idea for something to write about. But I knew it was never going to happen. Even during the day, sometimes I’ll think of something, a stupid joke, a story, and I know from experience that I have to write it down immediately, because regardless of how hard I try to keep things in my head, if I don’t write it down I’ll forget about it.

It’s one thing to have a good idea and then to lose it. It’s another thing to remember having the idea but not being able to remember what that idea was. That’s what this is like. I clearly remember having the idea, recognizing it as something that, if not being a necessarily great idea, it was something that I could have gotten a whole blog post out of. That’s always the hardest part of these things, just figuring out what I’m going to write about.

I wish I had some sort of an idea generator. Like a partner. He or she would come up with the ideas, and I would write them out. Obviously this wouldn’t work out, because I would insist on taking all of the credit. “Not even a shout-out?” my idea person would ask me after the first week or so of collaboration. “Nothing!” I’d scream, insisting that I was doing all of the real work, refusing to share even the tiniest morsel of praise. So that probably wouldn’t work.

Unless I could get a string of partners, and use them all up one after the other. Individually, each collaborator probably wouldn’t stand for my bullshit more than a week. But if I just kept finding a new one, I’d theoretically have a supply of never-ending ideas. But that would probably take up so much of my time, posting ads on craigslist, hiring people to give me ideas, denying them credit, putting more ads up for more people, stopping all of my ex-partners from collaborating against me, warning others not to do business with me.

And I just thought about it, what, am I supposed to be paying these people? That would never work out either, because I’m not making any money from any of this. And with me still unwilling to share any of the credit, why would anybody want to work for me? What would be the trade-off? I got it, I could post ads on craigslist telling people I’m looking for a collaborator, and that I’m willing to pay, big time. But I’d write that I need to see some potential ideas, to give me a taste of what this person has to offer. And that would be it. I could just use those sample ideas indefinitely.

But even that seems like a lot of work, constantly going onto craigslist. I’m sure there’s tons of anti-spam policies preventing that type of Internet exploitation. I could offer experience or college credit maybe. No, nobody really buys that.

You know what I need? Some sort of an idea generating software. Something where a computer will just tell me what to write about every day. In fact, now that I’m thinking about it, I could just go on Wikipedia and click on the random article button and see what comes up. Hold on, let me give it a try.

OK, I don’t think this is going to work out. I clicked the random article button and the first thing that came up was a profile of some retired German soccer player. Even worse, he’s a goalie. I practically fell asleep as soon as I started to realize what I was looking at. I mean seriously, talk about obscure, random nonsense. What could I do with any of this? Germans: boring. Soccer: boring. Goalies: boring. Retired: boring. Boring, boring, boring.

I’ll try one more time. Hmm. This time it led me to Alternative Rock. I guess that’s slightly less boring. I like Pearl Jam. I like Bush. But it’s too general. And even though I like the music, I’d say the alt-rock scene is a little too douchey. Just think about alt-rock now. Nickleback. That’s it, I can’t even go any further naming shitty bands. I wouldn’t even call it alt-rock anymore, it’s just rock, or just lame. The whole idea of alternative rock was that it was different right? And so I guess bands today that would have called themselves alternative are instead calling themselves indie. But that’s a whole different level of lame. And whereas what I’m thinking of when I think of alternative rock music was awesome when I was in middle school, now it’s almost like classic rock, just because it’s been around forever. I hate listening to classic rock. First of all, I hate the DJs. They just talk and talk and talk. Second of all, they never play the really good songs, they just play Hotel California and Stairway to Heaven on repeat, which would for alt rock translate to Jeremy and Machine Head on repeat, followed by really annoying commercials that always seem to last longer than the actual music.

So yeah, whatever, the random button on Wikipedia got me about two paragraphs, but I’m looking for like actual blog post material. This all started with an idea I had right before I fell asleep. Sometimes I’ll have these ideas during the day and I’ll write myself a little note on my iPhone, reminding myself of my spontaneous genius. Other times I’ll go for my iPhone, but like a two-year-old with an attention span of a jar of mayonnaise, I immediately get distracted by how awesome my phone is and then I start playing with apps and settings. But that night in bed, I was like half asleep. I thought to myself, shouldn’t you get up and try and write this down? But I was so comfortable, I was just like, nah, I’ll just write some bullshit in the morning about how I forgot about what I was going to write about.