I’m going to leap on this one if for no other reason, Kris, that I suspect that much of what’s behind this is…

WHAT IS THE MAGICAL IDEA THAT IS GOING TO GO VIRAL AND GET ME A MILLION EYEBALLS?

Again. Wrong question.

The last two Sundays while I was at the gym pre-football games I had to keep running over to the check-in counter, grab another scrap of paper and write yet another “idea” down. Some of them are pure shit.

Some of them are pretty damned good.

I end up my socks stuffed with paper scraps that I set on the dining room table, then pick and choose.

The harder I work out, the more juices I send into my brain. Of course, to one of your other points, we might want to stop spending so much goddamned time focusing on ourselves and learn to be a noticer.

This morning I was inspired by a woman who was pushing a rack of three 45-lb plates (on either end thank you) with her abdomen. We spoke, briefly. Damn, woman. That was impressive. Shortly after watching that I pushed a lot more weight on a chest press than my injured shoulder had allowed in the last three years. That’s pretty interesting to me.

Next question was just how much we worry way too much about taking a break, and being compulsive about our workouts, and end up sliding backwards.

Story idea.

It’s already out there.

Stories are everywhere, in the air, right in front of us. But we are so monumentally self-referential we can’t see shit. It strikes me that until and unless we learn how to observe, think, consider how X might be of interest to our readers as observed through our lens, we will either be stymied or write pure pap. And boy is there a lot of both.

Or, folks just steal others’ listicles and tag a popular reader (a distressing trend on Medium) just to get something published under their name.

I think at some level part of me wants to shriek GET A FUCKING LIFE ALREADY.

I won’t, but I’m tempted. The more I read, live, push, experiment, fail, flail, fuck-up and make stupid messes, the more superb material I have. My problem is too goddamned many titles that I don’t have time to finish.