Idearrhea

Idearrhea is a word I am proud to have coined several years ago in a speech I gave at Toastmasters.

At least, I know of no other person who has claimed such an esteemed achievement. Not even Kim Jong Un.

It is, of course, borrowed from the root word – diarrhea.

It refers to a person who has so many ideas swirling around in their head that when they articulate them, say verbally or on paper, they just pour out all at once in a big mess.

I suppose the celebrity who suffered the most (or more likely benefited) from this condition was Robin Williams. He actually made a career out of Idearrhea.

I occasionally suffer from it too, but not often enough to make a career out of it, and the quality of Idearrhea is certainly not on a par with Mr. Williams.

Oh, I wish I suffered from that Grade A kind of Idearrhea. The kind where there's always a smile on your face and on everyone else's too. I would gladly ingest whatever ideas would cause such glorious Idearrhea. I would also cut out all probiotics from my diet.

I guess you could say Einstein had Idearrhea about the universe and it appeared as a big mess of equations. He managed to clean up his Idearrhea very nicely into the neat package that is E=MC2.

I am aware this is not a very "Christmassy" kind of topic. I apologize for that. I figure you've probably had it with Christmas, and the topic relates very well to my last few days.

Newman has had diarrhea for the last 3 days. The traditional kind. The kind that stains my rugs, floors, sofa, shoes and bedspread. These are the places Newman decided to "express" his diarrhea.

The kind that does not make me smile.

Yesterday I went to the movie The Theory of Everything, about the life of Stephen Hawking. It co-starred a woman named Felicity Jones, an astonishing actress far, far more adorable than diarrhea.

When I got home I had to disinfect the above mentioned objects of diarrhea. I also had to wash a very particular part of Newman's body in the shower.

I'll stop there.

It was kind of a weird feeling, moving rather suddenly from watching the exalted, lofty pursuits of Mr. Hawking trying to figure out why the universe exists, to removing diarrhea from shoe laces and wondering why there is diarrhea in MY universe.

To recover I ingurgitated several beers.

Thankfully, that led to a mild form of Idearrhea, and the birth of this article.

It may be all over the internet, but it's not all over my house.