UberSkate

In graduate school we read the Jesuit philosopher Bernard Lonergan. Technically, Lonergan was also a theologian, but he was more concerned with the process by which we arrive at truth rather than the truth itself as expressed in dogmas. That is, he focused on internal method and insight. It wasn’t the known that interested him as much as how we got to know it. That’s an oversimplification, but you get the idea.

It was heady territory, but it was required, according to Lonergan, in order to attain right thinking. This involved so much preparatory work that I found it exhausting. No wonder people were lazy thinkers, I thought. Who could blame them? I remember at the end of my first semester in the fall writing a parody of a Lonerganian recipe for pumpkin pie. It had several steps, the first of which went on for three pages and ended with “buy a pumpkin.”

Bright ideas are a dime a dozen.

_{Bernard Lonergan, SJ (1904-1984)}

I bring this up now, because the quote that stands out clearly to me from Lonergan is, “bright ideas are a dime a dozen.” His point, I think, was to criticize the method of thinking that led to the bright idea in the first place, mainly because bright ideas tend to be neither. I come at it from the opposite direction. In my mind, I see bright ideas as worthless, because people seldom put the work into them to make them come true. In other words, they’re just a bunch of hooey as Barack Obama might say, echoing Harry Truman.

Enter my own bright ideas, stage right. I’ve got a lot of them and even pursued one or two to the point of putting up some Benjamins, as they say. Unfortunately, those investments were as successful as my directing some of my IRA into Silicon Valley Bank prior to its collapse. So, take what I am about to tell you with a Bonneville Speedway of salt.

I’ve written before about PetMat, a suctioned mat to prevent the dog’s bowl from sliding across the kitchen floor; SlingThing to throw the dog a ball without getting your hand and fingers slimed; SnoFlo, a plastic plow to shovel snow from your walkway; and self-repairing polymer paint so that when your car gets dinged in the Safeway parking lot, it’ll look like new by the time you pull into your driveway (see A Dime a Dozen). I still don’t have a name for that one yet. I thought of “Mermer” but have decided against it. Also, notice that the names of these ideas/inventions have to be cute, which usually means misspelled.

Lately, I have come up with the following bright ideas either for inventions or names of inventions: GoFlo will enable you to urinate in your airplane seat without having to get up and jostle with other passengers for the phone booth of a bathroom; GoshGalosh comes from last week’s post about galoshes and was suggested by a devoted subscriber and friend (see “Gosh, Galoshes!”); and Hey Dude, which I offer as the name for a Beatles cover band. Just give me two percent.

Lastly, I propose UberSkate. If you want to go on a skateboard ride, you text SkateDate on your phone app. A kid in a hoodie and Vans shows up on a longboard and takes you wherever you want to go. You ride on the back, of course. I’m thinking here of skaters without skateboards, middle schoolers who want to go on a date but are too young to drive, and old people looking for the rush of skateboarding without the danger of cracking their skulls on the sidewalk. You could even abbreviate the text to “Sk8D8.” It meets all of the major marketing criteria: cute, rhymes, completely obnoxious. Think of it. The market could be huge.

Next steps? I have to assemble a group of engineers and entrepreneurs to produce this stuff à la Steve Jobs. If I can do that, I will have turned my marketing insights into reality. And, given the job market, how hard could that be? I know Lonergan would be proud. I’m not too sure about my grad professors.

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