Wrote a story, but can't come up with a good punchline. Which makes sense, since stories should be written with an idea from the start, not as a stream of consciousness. But, as they say, you make do with what you have.
**Good ideas come to mind unexpectedly
**This phrase kept spinning in my head. During my combat stance by the coffee machine, and when I went outside with my smoking colleagues out of boredom, and when I was buying my favorite lemon-flavored glazed curd snacks in the evening. Does this mean that by deliberately thinking about how to achieve success, I'm only pushing it further away? Or does the wandering of ideas through the brain need to be prepared by bringing it (the brain) to a preliminary boil?
To increase my chances, in the evening I flipped through brochures from contemporary art exhibitions, with John Cage's music playing in the background. Then all night I dreamed that the universe consists of parallelepipeds, which I arrange in the right order by rolling dice. The idea is fresh, of course, but calling it good would be a huge stretch.
The thought of a creative breakthrough just wouldn't let me go. I started doing freewriting for 10 minutes a day, and even almost gave in to the persuasion of Facebook ads to boost my creativity with microdosing mushrooms from the Netherlands. The only thing that stopped me was a weird disclaimer in all caps: "WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR YOU GETTING PUT IN PRISON FOR 3-5 YEARS". Prison, of course, fosters deep reflection, but they don't sell lemon curd snacks there, only vanilla ones, which didn't suit me at all.
The next item for unlocking my po-dance-tial was shamanic dancing with a tambourine, but a catch awaited me here, too. A colleague told me that an acquaintance of hers danced so much that he signed his apartment over to the tambourine-bearers (tambouriners?), and now lives in a cardboard box under a bridge. I remembered just in time that dampness is bad for my collection of John Cage vinyl records, which meant I had to look for another option.
It occurred to me that a rush of natural hormones makes a person do unexpected eccentric things, and this would definitely lead me to success. I installed a trendy dating app on my phone where only women can message first, and decided to rely on fate. Set my profile to show I'm open to relationships of any format with any gender, including non-binary people.
It just crossed my mind that if not binary, then ternary, that is, base-3. I wrote in my profile that I'm ternary, like the "Setun" computer. And that's where I hit the jackpot! Female fans of computing history started messaging me en masse. For some reason they often mention a threesome, probably to keep up the conversation about electromechanical computers.
I just don't understand why they always show up to the date with an extra guy. I guess it's their N+1 redundancy principle, where there always has to be one to spare.