Inspiration comes in strange places. Dots connect, ideas coalesce, thoughts combine. These kinds of events are most common for me in circumstances where it is almost impossible to write them down. I often get revelations driving and have to pull over to write them down. But the other morning it was in the shower.
I was getting ready to head up to the Nullify Now Tour event at SNHU in Manchester, on Saturday, when I had a thought. It wasn’t a new thought, but somewhere between rinse, lather, and repeat what had previously been random musings got together to form a new way to present the idea and I was soaking wet with neither paper nor pencil anywhere nearby–not that I could use them in the present circumstances.
So I figured the thought was doomed. Thousands of other things would crowd my mind, mug the thought, and leave it to die in an ally. There it would lay slowly bleeding to death, unable to survive on the insubstantial life support of short term memory, unless I found it and resuscitated it.
Writing it down usually allows me to preserve the thought so hours or days later, when I find it in my pants pocket while folding laundry fresh from the dryer, I can look at the pulpy looking turd with a furrowed brow and try to recall what the hieroglyphs meant when I committed them to writing.
(Sometimes the pulpy pocket turds are yellow; shout out to 3M for inventing Post-It notes.)
Well this thought must have been made of sturdy stuff. Days later it was still alive.
So what was it?
Government is a necessary (preferably limited) evil, laid out like a salad bar. There are all kinds of services your tax dollars pay for. Some of them are for “just in case kinds of things” like public safety. Then there are roads and schools and clerks and so on. And then there are unemployment, welfare, heating aid, and a host of social support services, and the cost of the bureaucracy itself. 