Upgrades

Something strange has been happening to me lately. I have been trying to improve things, recently, things I'm not suppose to improve. I can't seem to stop myself.

Let me back up and make clear that I have not taken any proactive steps to improve anything... well, maybe myself, but that's another blog entirely. I'm more of an idea guy. What happens is, I'll be doing something, going about life like it ain't no thing, when right in the middle of the most common, mundane thing I'll have a thought that I can't help but share with the world.

For example, "They should put the parking lot under the Wal-Mart!" I had this thought walking across the Wal-Mart parking lot from my car. I realize that it would never happen, that Wal-Mart has it's own savings challenge, and it would never fork out the extra money to build it's store over the parking lot, but I do think it would make a great improvement... for all stores. It would be like a suburban Big Dig Revolution! There would be so much more space, and I wouldn't have to see an empty parking lot of street lights glowing in my window at night.

Most of the time, my improvements aren't quite so profound. TV commercials are like cannon-fodder to my always-upgrading mind. "What the should have done is ended with the dancing dog." The sad underbelly here is that I'm actually paying close enough attention to critique.

But critique is a harsh word, and I don't think I'm complaining about any of these things that I'm improving. It's more that I'm genuinely hoping to improve them. It's not the flaw that I see, it's the improvement. And aren't we suppose to be trying to improve the world, or at least the world around us. Maybe one of my ideas will catch on and I'll leave my footprint on mankind!

I've had so many of these random improvement thoughts, matched by my obvious delusions of grandeur, that I thought about extending my blog empire with John Duffy's Upgrades, but after some thought, I was afraid it would sound too whiny and ultimately decided that it would not be an improvement to anybody's life... namely mine.