Ideas about ideas

Drugs, propaganda, death throes of consensus reality

The drinking table

When I was 23, I had a total of five good ideas: for a movie theater ad, a politics/history magazine, a video clip for the Russian anthem, a series of postcards, and one more, about a table. Original ideas didn’t come to me often, and I was anxious it would be a long time until another good one appears. So I cherished the ones that I had, even though my lack of skills and resources meant I wouldn’t be able to realize them.

I created a website called “So here is the idea” and described all five in too much detail. It was an idea about ideas: that if I put an excessive amount of effort into a draft, it could become something more than a draft—something that could exist in the world instead of my head or my notebook—in a word, “content”. Not exactly what the ideas had wanted, but the best I could do.

The fifth idea was to cover the surface of a large plywood table I’d just bought at IKEA with drawings of the alcohol I drank at the table—a visual diary of a drunk. I didn’t…