So I’m sure you’re asking, What’s the deal with the ideas?  Why haven’t I been getting my ideas every day, delivered to my inbox?  Where’s the personal attention and care?  Why did I give you my bank account number?  Why are there so many transactions on my monthly statement that seem to have to do with Fleshlight maintenance? The answer is, of course, for you to shut up.  There’s no connection between any of those things, and if you think it’s easy to keep a Fleshlight from breaking down after ten or twelve uses a day and two or three half-hearted cleanings, well, I guess you just don’t do things with the same intensity that we do.

So yes, let us go ahead and put it out there and admit it:  the ideas have not been coming to you every day as we promised that they would.  However, there’s a very good reason for it, and as most things usually do, it comes down to the fact that there was a small flaw in our creative process from the beginning, one that we identified far too late, and only when it began to catastrophically break down.  Now we’re picking up the pieces and trying to reorganize our idea-making.  Allow me to explain the flaw in question, by way of laying out more specifically what it is we do, and how our process works.

Each morning, Ryan and I wake bright and early at the small apartment that we share in downtown Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and after a steaming cup of coffee and some light conversation about the coming day, we take a leisurely stroll through the sitting room (we keep family heirlooms and the good china in there), turn left down a long hallway, and stop at a point along the wall that we have marked with chalk.  You probably wouldn’t see it if you weren’t looking – it’s a tiny mark at about shin level.  Standing there, we knock twice on the wall itself and then stand back as it creaks open.  It’s better to stand back – we installed the secret door a few weeks ago and we’re still working out the kinks in the mechanism, so from time to time it swings violently outward toward you.  We’ve lost more than a few Idea Men that way.

We go through the secret door in the wall and walk down several flights of stone steps into the dark.  There’s a light, musty breeze.  You can hear the echo of your footfalls.  There’s the distinct plip-plop of dripping water somewhere in the distance.  Your first instinct, I know, would be to light a torch or flip on a lightswitch, but we’ve found that torches are expensive, as is paying an electric bill, so we tend to leave things in the dark and navigate mostly by feel.  Besides, by keeping the lights on we don’t worry the bat population, and we feel like the secret chamber is staying carbon neutral.

At the bottom of the steps we shoulder our way through the heavy wooden door into a tiny, candlelit room where Ernesto stays.  I don’t think that he sleeps much – he’s always up when we visit him – but somehow he always seems awake and alert when we stop by.  He’ll stand up quickly from his writing desk, the heavy chain on his ankle rattling, and shake our hands gratefully.  It’s this kind of consistent enthusiasm that, for the most part, confirms for us that we’ve done the right thing as far as bringing him aboard.  I generally say hello, sip my coffee, look around, and then gesture at the golf pencil and tiny scraps of paper littered on his desk.

“Ernesto,” I say.  “How’re they coming this morning?”

“Oh, Mr. Ken, sir, muy bueno.  Las ideas son gran, sir.  Very good.  Yes.”

“That’s great. Ernesto.”  Ryan has ducked off to the side just slightly, where the bread is.  He tosses me a few crusts, and even in the muted light I catch them easily – we’ve gotten to be real pros.  Ernesto’s eyes get big, and I can’t help but smile.  When he really gets working, he can just eat, and eat, and eat – sometimes two meals a day!  I hand Ernesto some of the bread, and toss the rest into the dark, away from the table.  The rats will get it. I pat Ernesto on the shoulder.  “Alright, buddy, well, we checked the subscribers list, and there are about 148 signed up now.  So, heh heh, get cracking.  Vaminos!”

He nods excitedly, still chewing, and he scurries back to his desk and begins scribbling furiously at his bits of paper.  Ryan comes over and claps me on the back, and looks over at Ernesto.  “And Ernesto,” he says.  Ernesto turns and listens attentively.  “No more ideas about freedom or your family!”  We laugh, and Ernesto laughs too.  I can say this without shame – Ernesto really is the backbone of what we do at the Idea Factory.  He’s become like family to us, although I won’t deny that it helps a lot to be able to close the secret door and disavow all knowledge of him when the federal government or girls come over to visit.

And having admitted that much about his value to us, I can freely admit to all of you precisely how difficult it was for us, how personally unpleasant, when we wandered down to the Idea Factory during the middle of last week and found that poor Ernesto, poor, sweet Ernesto – he had been devoured by wolves.

Now, I’d like to say in my defense that though it was my idea to bring in the wolves in the first place, it was Ryan’s idea to keep them in the Idea Factory.  My assertion was that they should be, as best we could manage, fitted with some sort of wolf-human mind control chip (patent-pending) and used as our minions during conflicts with our enemies, or trips to the grocery store, or to help with registering our vehicles and what not.  Lacking this technology, however, Ryan convinced me that where the wolves belonged was down in the Idea Factory with Ernesto.  We would tie them up, of course – we’re not idiots – and this way, we could go down and feed them things or incite them to violence any time that we wanted and then simply close the secret door behind us when we were done.  We believed, perhaps naively, that the wolves and Ernesto would cultivate some sort of ancient Mexican-wolf bond much deeper than we could possibly understand.  They did not.  In fact, they ate most every part of him but a few scraps of what appeared to be a femur and some hair on the writing desk.  And most tragically, there’s no way for us to tell how many ideas, the lifeblood of our personal and professional lives, that we lost in the process of having our Mexican devoured by wolves!

So now we keep the secret door to the Idea Factory closed, and now we try and come up with one or two ideas a day and post them here, on this web site, for all of you, and for the memory of your friend and ours, Ernesto.  Sometimes, in the night, I imagine that I can still hear his native song of wonder and hope, which he would sing softly to himself in his basement lair.  It went like this:

Donde esta me escuela?

Mi gato es mi amo, tambien.

Meyamo Ersnesto, abuelo…

Meyamo Ernesto – y tu?

You should take them and collect them and hide them in a Tupperware container under your bed and keep them for yourself FOREVER.

This may become difficult during your daily small talk with coffee shop employees.

Throw some poop.

Maybe you should throw your cat in a blender.

Just sayin.