I’m addicted to ideas. When dull, I snack on them – open a page of snippets and munch them like peanuts. An idea resembles a locker-room towel-flick when I was a boy, taunting me to react. An idea juts its jaw and smirks, “So whaddya think of that, smarty-pants?!”

What the idea concerns hardly matters as long as it’s human nature. Only humans, I think, generate ideas – because an idea implies its contradiction. Other creatures see things one way. Wrong they may be, but not perplexed.

My addiction is no more purposive than any. No addict intends to be saddled by their compulsion. I am not progressing to any Promised Land or a-hah that precludes further inquiry. I don’t believe in answers that aren’t asterisked, tentative, preliminary. Behind every yes crouches a but like a bobcat to pounce. Folks who arrive at “the truth” have quit looking, likely from exhaustion. Having ended up here, here is where they were meant to end up.

My addiction is not to brain-activity in general. I hate puzzles, for example, where the answer is known. Crossword, jigsaw, Wordle, what’s the use? Idea-wrestling is suspenseful, like a game of chance. No telling what might turn up.

Idea-wrestling assuages my insatiable vanity. I imagine I’m clever at figuring things out. So do knuckle-crackers crack their knuckles loudly – because they can. Same goes for the double-jointed or freaks who can touch their noses with their tongues. Their knack distinguishes them from the majority (who wouldn’t dream of trying).

Ideas provision my pen. I enjoy writing almost more than thinking. The way I write is a sort of thinking, I suppose, each syllable discovering its successor till a sentence ends. I do not write to report but to find out, much as patients prattle to their shrinks.

One must, though, write about something. Simply saying what one sees becomes tiresome to reader and writer: what’s the point? (This is why most “nature writing”, however well-meaning, makes me fidget, then grump. I don’t want to know what the daffodil looks like, but what it means – to you – how you and its yellowness gavotte.) A juicy idea commences a dialogue, maybe a debate. Oscar Wilde was a wizard at provoking response. I just ran into this jab (with Wilde, there’s always another): “One should always play fairly – when one has the winning cards.” In eleven unfancy words, a quip, taunt, joke, poke, subversion of pulpit platitudes: a very Zorro of the retort. Color me envious.

I do not imagine my idea-tussling will benefit humanity any more than my roughhousing with puppy Henry. I do it for sport, to feel good, for no reason. Unlike my beloved Dickens, whom I am always rereading, I am no reformer. I’m seldom confident what ought to be done, then often wrong. Any leader is more or less a misleader, they can’t help it, because any answer is partial. I’m convinced that love, truth, justice, grace, decency, generosity, beauty and humility are the right stars to steer by, but not always. Sometimes bad people accomplish good things and vice versa. It’s complicated.

I like my ideas bite-sized – a sentence or two – to prick my brain into motion. I cannot for the life of me read philosophy or theology for that is to plunge my mind into someone else’s system. Give me Plato, Aquinas, even Hegel in soundbites, to spur my mulish brain to a trot. I prefer my own thoughts, not because they’re better, but because they’re mine, not memorized.

The cause of my idea-addiction is beyond me. Does anyone know what makes them them?