Bad ideas, I've had my share. I had one a couple of days ago. The thing is, I seldom know it's a bad idea until I've tried it. I guess that's good, at least better than not trying things because they seem like bad ideas.

I went to a beach next to a nuclear reactor on Saturday. It wasn't as terrible as it might sound, though certainly a little creepy. I'm no nuclear engineer, but it certainly seemed easier to me to dump the nuclear waste into the sea than to pump it up and over the mountains behind the plant and still further inland to where? The water looked clean enough and there were no funny smells, and the surf was pounding because of a typhoon messing around somewhere in the neighborhood. The best waves I've seen in a year and a half living in Korea--so as lemmings are programmed to leap from cliffs, I was compelled to body surf. I walked out into the water over a strand of sharp rocks and out finally onto soft sand. The waves seemed to be breaking on the rocks but I ignored that--look at that surf! Five-foot waves coming in series, not to be squandered. So I caught one for a short ride and was gently deposited on the rocks. No bumps or scratches, only the exhilaration of the wave ride.

It began to seem more like a good idea, so I did it again. Second time I nearly missed the wave completely--later I wished I had--but I caught the crest, and was dumped hard on the rocks, chest first. That hurt. My hand went numb, my chest was bruised, but very little blood because there was no real dragging and scraping, just a big mash. The cuts I got were more punctures than scrapes, very small. It took a good twenty minutes to regain the feeling in my hand, which I guess was squashed when I landed on it. 

That took all the swim out of me, and when I walked out of the water, the blood started flowing, not much, but from about twelve places at once. I looked a little messy, but felt pretty good. Still, our Korean friends felt compelled to doctor me up. One of the guys took off to a friend's house for some antiseptic, which he then applied with great care and thoroughness. I got some sympathetic looks from the girls too, which is always nice. But I also got many more looks that said, 'Man, that was a bad idea'. 
 

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I remember another bad idea I had a long time ago. I was about five or six and thought it would be a good idea to rip off the cardboard cover of my giant Spiderman coloring book, as well as the cover of my brother's, scotch tape them both to my arms and jump out the third floor window. It seemed so easy; I wondered why there weren't people soaring all over the neighborhood on cardboard wings. How had no one else thought of this?!? There I was, about to free mankind from his humdrum earthbound existence at a precocious six years old. What a heady feeling! Pure genius! 

I planned to buzz our street for a while, come back for dinner, and ask my mom for permission to fly to Florida the next morning to visit Grandma (we lived in New York). I imagined my friends looking up from the seats of their Big Wheels with envy as I did loops and spirals over their heads. Though I wouldn't have believed it only the day before, I realized then that this was going to beat the hell out of even my new Batmobile.

Somehow in my six years on earth, I had been exposed to the notion of the 'test flight'. I don't know where that idea came from, but I suspect my life may have been saved by watching way too much TV. Maybe I'd seen something about airplanes or flight tests? Or maybe it occurred to me naturally as I looked out the window, wings at full span, scared shitless at the sight of the ground which had never seemed so far down before. I had never been afraid of heights, but I realized then that I was afraid of falling from one, and it was then that I was visited by my best idea of the day, maybe of my life.

Careful not to rip off my new wings, I climbed to the top of the bunkbed I shared with my brother. I knelt on top and adjusted my wings, but a few rapid test flaps showed my tape job to be lacking. Whew, this test flight idea was starting to pay off already.

I slid back down for a quick modification probably half a roll of tape will do-spare no expense! 'think of all the money I'm saving on plane tickets. I scrambled back up top--a few flaps-yes yes that's much better-and I hurled myself swan-style into space, flapping like mad, free of the earth at last.

Anyone who has ever fallen from any height, cardboard wings or no, knows what happened next. It was a rough landing, but nothing was broken and I walked away from it when I was able to breathe again. My wings were bent but the tape had held, and I reflected on the data I'd gathered from my test. I didn't know any physics (still don't), but I knew that a rock if dropped would have fallen as fast and as hard as I had, so it didn't take long to realize that no improvements on my design were possible. My conclusion: bad idea. But I did learn something important: Jumping out of third story windows is a very bad idea. 
 

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 My youthful genius again manifested itself when I was about sixteen, when I and a few of my friends got BB guns. We shot cans and bottles but that got boring, so we graduated to rats, birds, squirrels, chipmunks, really anything that moved. That satisfied us for a while, until someone got the idea: We'd go out into the woods, choose up teams, and shoot each other. 

Of course, we were going to be smart about it-we agreed that we wouldn't pump the guns more than three times and that there would be no head shots. But a teenager with no shooting skills saying he won't aim for the face is like any man saying he won't piss on the toilet seat. Shit happens.

And the three-pump rule never really held either. It seems that we independently discovered the principles that govern the escalation of international warfare. One guy gets plugged (bombed) and he thinks the other guy isn't playing by the rules, so he pumps his gun four or five times (saturation bombing) and gives a good one back. The other guy ups the ante with 7 or 8 pumps (wholesale firebombing, damn the innocent) until eventually the superweapon (nuke) is unleashed  ten pumps, which was the limit at which the seal on the guns began to hiss and leak. Three pumps is a relatively safe lob; you can see the BB arcing toward the target and it will only sting for a few seconds if it hits you, rarely leaving even so much as a little welt. At ten pumps the BB travels at a few hundred feet per second and can quite easily lodge under the skin. Naked eyeballs don't have a chance.

I can't say it really surprised me the day I got mine. I was out on patrol with my buddy Scott, hunting down the wily and elusive Brian Quinn, who was armed with a pump pistol and was known to shoot with his eyes closed when shit got hairy. Scott had already plugged him once, sending Quinn howling down the trail and out of sight. We followed in slow pursuit, wary of an ambush, but we walked right down the middle of the trail; in other words, we were perfect targets in plain view of any idiot within a few hundred meters. I heard the smack as the BB planted itself in my forehead, about an inch above my right eye. It stunned me and I went down rubbing my head and cursing Quinn to hell and back.

He came out of the bush laughing as I pried the BB out of my forehead. I wanted to give him one back at point blank range, but he was a lot bigger than me and had something like thirteen older brothers, so I screamed instead, You're not supposed to shoot for the face you f&@$%!!!...î

ìI wasn't aiming for your face' said Quinn, ìI was aiming for Scott.' 

That was probably true, and I realized the game had been a bad idea. Luckily I didn't have to lose my eye to learn that. Another guy named Rob Something, a couple of years my senior in high school, did lose an eye to the same game a few years earlier. I had known about that, but at 16 years old I thought that other people's bad ideas somehow didn't apply to me.
 

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Mark Twain said that he couldn't believe how stupid his parents were when he was seventeen; and when he was twenty, he couldn't believe how much they had learned in three years. Brian Quinn was the kid my mom always told me not to hang around with but I did anyway. I liked him because he was an endless source of interesting ideas, most of them bad, though it took me some time to learn that, about three years. 

We used to sit on the roof of the VFW post after school smoking cigarettes, telling outrageous lies about girls, and throwing cracked shingles into the street. That in itself was a bad idea that got me my first ride in a police car one summer. Sometime before that, Brian inspired us all to jump off the roof.

His idea was to take a running jump and catch hold of some thin trees growing up near the side of the building, reckoning they would bend and give us a gentle landing on the ground. It was a tough sell, so Quinn, as always, went first.

We watched as he jumped and saw it all play out exactly as he said it would. Good idea! We all lined up for our turn. I think there's never been a game invented that doesn't get boring after a while, so we started cooking up variations: Try it with one hand. Grab two separate trees. Jump off backward. And so on until it quickly became a contest to see who could do the coolest (read: stupidest) jump.

There were four or five trees growing pretty close together, and Quinn said he would jump off sideways-beat that! —laying his torso across the trees and riding them all to the ground. This was the inevitable end of all such games with Brian Quinn; he seemed unable to stop himself short of the final straw. Everyone else knew it was a bad idea, maybe even a very bad idea, but we merely stepped back and gave him clearance.

He hit the trees with some speed and was immediately spun in the air, raked by branches, and slammed to the ground hard on his back. We knew he hadn't died because he started screaming as soon as he hit the trees and we still heard him as he ran into his apartment two blocks away. We crowned him champion in absentia and smoked some more cigarettes.

I lost touch with Brian Quinn after high school. I went to college and I heard he went to jail. I don't know what he went for, but it didn't surprise me. Mom was right; he was full of bad ideas.
 

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I continued to have bad ideas in college, but they were of a slightly different order; they usually involved excesses in sex, drugs, and alcohol, though every now and then there was some risk to life and limb like the good old days of my childhood. But I started to get better at distinguishing between good and bad ideas. This is not to say that I stopped behaving like an idiot, I just became more aware of my idiocy. And I suddenly found myself surrounded by thousands of other young idiots, and we all tended to validate each other's bad ideas.

In my sophomore year I joined a fraternity, which are notorious breeding grounds for all sorts of outrageously bad ideas. I often lay down with dogs and considered myself lucky if I woke up with only fleas. I can't count the number of times I puked in streets, in houses, from rooftops, on friends. but I do know that I was arrested exactly once in those three years at S.U.N.Y. Albany (That's a long story but it will suffice to say that it stemmed from a long domino chain of bad ideas stretching back to the day I decided to join the fraternity).

I had bad ideas, but others had worse. Some people got addicted to nasty drugs. Some died in bed with their throats full of puke. Some drowned on spring break holidays or were mangled in drunken car wrecks. Some got herpes or AIDS. Some even got married. But I managed to make it through those three years with some sort of education and none but the most easily curable venereal diseases. I considered the first leg of my college career a success, even though I dropped out after junior year with a pregnant girlfriend and a C average.

How could I consider it a success when everyone around me thought I was simply trying to justify an expensive fuck-up? Something in me was changing--the world was getting harder to divide into good and bad. During the next four years I worked at several mindless jobs, tasted the world outside the university walls and found it to be populated by just as many idiots as the world I'd left, and later finished my degree at another school...all during that time I had ideas that seemed to be both good and bad at once. I saw that one person's bad idea could be good for someone else and vice versa. I often saw bad ideas produce positive results. I learned that the words good and bad often told me much more about the values and priorities of the people who spoke them and much less about the world outside their heads. I learned to say, 'Now there's an idea !' which I liked because it conveys excitement and interest without implying judgment. In short, I got a lot more confused by everything that had once seemed simple, but I got a lot less hung up on bad ideas.
 

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I came to Korea in 1998 to work in a hagwan. That wasn't a particularly good idea, but it wasn't particularly bad either. It's been many things, and my life here has exploded whatever remained of my hand-me-down notions of what constitutes good and bad. Best of all, Korea has given me lots of new ideas, and plenty of them are still bad as ever. But that doesn't matter much to me because I know that it's better to have bad ideas than no ideas at all.
 

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