Innovation

A friend of mine - Brian - recently told me a story about his childhood trips to the neighborhood Dairy Queen. In addition to the ice cream, Brian and his brother looked forward to the "Spy Hunter" arcade game (right) stored just inside the D.Q. They enjoyed it so much that the younger, dumber 8-year-old versions of themselves devised a scheme to punch a hole through a quarter, tie fishing wire around it, feed it into the arcade long enough to trigger the game to start and then yank the quarter back out of the machine by pulling the fishing wire.

The plan didn't work for a lot of reasons, the least of which was the cashier's 10-foot proximity to the "Spy Hunter" machine. Even if the ploy worked, Brian and his brother would never have gotten away with playing an afternoon of unlimited spy hunting.

What's worse: they wasted a good quarter, which by 8-year-old conversion rates, was about 20 bucks.

But my friend's attempt at innovation is noble, and worth noting as the prologue to my tale.
__________________

When I was seven, I wanted to be an inventor. I spent my childhood imagining all the fanciful ways I could fortify my world with safety and originality. I marveled at Ferris Bueller's ability to trick his family into thinking he was sick in bed while he made the city of Chicago his own amusement park. I aped, as best I could, the wildly playful practical qualities of Pee-Wee Herman's friends and furniture. Although I never successfully conjured up a floating wizard head or a chair that hugged me, I made my room colorful (and messed up) in the process of trying. I watched in awe of "The Goonies" character Data and his ability to have something pop out of his jacket for every occasion.

It was Data that had the largest impact on my childhood desire to innovate. You'll notice I used the word "desire" and not "skill." Make no mistake, I had no innovative skill as a child. I wasted dozens of rolls of masking tape, toilet tissue and pajama pants trying to recreate Hollywood special effects.

The pajama pants were more of a comfort thing, while I used the other materials to create and build. To my recollection, I never actually used pajama pants as building materials.

Almost every "invention" I copied turned out failed and stupid, but at the time I seemed awesome to myself.

My most triumphant innovation might also be the one for which I got in the most trouble.

I wanted Data's utility jacket just like the one pictured to the right. Like Data's jacket, my jacket had to come equipped with every imaginable solution to every imaginable problem, including the spring-loaded boxing glove that shoots out of the inner lining to pummel evil pirates.

I was a child with my sights set high, but I was just a child. I had to start small. I found a windbreaker jacket that my Mom ordered special from Land's End or something. It was bright red, not gray like I wanted, and it had my name on it, which was very much in keeping with the original spirit of what would become my greatest achievement.

The way Pee-Wee Herman felt about his bike was how I intended to feel about this jacket.
It was a simple windbreaker made from synthetic nylon. It had two pockets of which I intended to take full advantage. At first I cut slits in the back of the windbreaker with the intention of storing my entire marble collection inside it. I'm not sure what I imagined would happen with these marbles.

Did I ever really believe that people slipped and fell to the ground upon contact with stray marbles? I guess I did because that was my plan. My original design was simple: 1. cut a hole in the lining 2. hide marbles in between the two layers of my windbreaker 3. wing marbles at assorted pirates.

It didn't really work. After I put all the marbles in the lining of my jacket, I had all this sudden weight that caused me to move slow and I didn't have any way to deploy the marbles quickly.

I dug the three dozen marbles out of the jacket's lining and devised a way to directly disperse the marbles onto the floor at a moments notice. I cut the bottom out of one the jacket pockets, sliced a swatch of jacket lining from the inside of my windbreaker and masking-taped it around the cut open pocket. I attached the lining swatch to a piece of string that I pulled, thus releasing the marbles as if from a trapdoor.

Why didn't I just hold a dozen marbles in my hand and throw them at the hypothetical pirates? Why did I insist on having them shower from my jacket like heaven's rain? Why did I fixate on the marbles in the first place?

These are all good questions. Had I asked any of them, I'm sure I would have skipped this project altogether and played with my Legos or something.

But I didn't ask those questions. Instead I dropped every last marble into my precariously sutchered pocket and gingerly waddled into the living room where my mother was peacefully doing something. When I was young and my mother was peacefully doing anything, it always worked out that it was I who broke that peacefulness.

Also, how could I have sprinted at top speeds from pirates, when I couldn't even move into the living room at a normal pace? I had to creep into the living room for fear of my pocket bursting before I could pull the string to showcase my invention to my mother?

I waddled into the living room and proudly announced that I invented a jacket just like Data in "The Goonies," a character from a movie I'm sure she still has never seen. I excitedly yanked the string, the flap exposed my open pocket and a hail of marbles clanged all over the hardwood floor on which I was standing.

Imagine my look of utter triumph; like a mason stepping back to take in his first view of the mansion he'd just completed. Each wall built sturdy enough to shelter the next five generations of his family. My jacket too was ingenious enough to shelter my loved ones from the storm of pirates.

I was an industrial titan. A boy-genius at the precipice of his future greatness.

My mom looked at me as if I had just removed a 12-foot tapeworm from my rectum. She had an incredulous look of someone with feelings of anger hot on the heels of her feelings of confusion. As if she were about to take her first bite into an apple only to have a stranger slap it from her hand and walk away laughing.

My memory recalls that my arms were out in a "ta-da" pose after dropping all my marbles, but I could be wrong. I hope I'm wrong, because my mom was pissed and perhaps worried that instead of dropping my marbles, that had fucking lost them. I would imagine that a "ta-da" pose would do nothing to make her think otherwise.

The same way it never occurred to me not to design something other than a marble spilling jacket, so did it elude me that my mom might get kinda peeved if her first born idiot walked into the room with a sliced up windbreaker dripping marbles all over her living room floor.

I'd like to say that my genius continued after that point. It did, but not in the manner I intended as a boy. My "genius" was in my ability to identify what a foolish child I was and to stop cutting up all my jackets.