I always carry a voice recorder around with me wherever I go. When get an idea, I want to capture it as quickly as possible because if I don't, my mind keeps wandering and pretty soon I forget what that great idea was. Sometimes, I can retrace my thought process to get it back, but when I can't It often bothers me for the rest of the day. So, today when I couldn't find my voice recorder, that frustration was multiplied by 50 which represented the amount of ideas that I lost. I remember seeing it this morning, and thought it was the last thing that I grabbed before I walked out the door. I looked in my laptop bag 3 times, checked every inch of my car four times and drove home at lunch to see if it dropped on the floor or ground when I left.

Of the 50 ideas, there were probably only 5 that would have gotten used. That is the ratio: one good idea to every ten that I have. loosing the voice recorder or the 5 usable ideas didn't bother me as much as the thought of someone else finding it, in particular someone that I know finding it and hearing those other 45 ideas that would never have made it on public display. I don't restrict the thoughts that I record. For most of them, I would have just been embarrassed because they were stupid. But, some of them could be raw, obscene, and possibly even offensive.

In truth, those unexpressed ideas are probably some of the ones that are more worthy of being explored, and probably a lot of great art lies within them. Maybe someday I'll be comfortable standing in front of them in a gallery, but, right now, when I am afraid of a neighbor or my child listening to what comes out of my head in my own voice, I'm just going to be glad I found that recorder on the nightstand where I put t last night