no private Idahos

the agony of someone getting to your idea first

I once found a lake that I was pretty sure nobody else knew about.

The summer before last, I was between jobs and my children were going to day camp. A period of unemployment is not too alarming or unusual in my line of work; TV writing often involves long (increasingly longer) periods of uselessness between fitful spurts of contract employment.

Often during these periods, when I am supposed to be working on writing new things and generating new ideas, I instead go to seed a little. I eat revolting convenience foods, like hard-boiled eggs from a bag, I stop washing my hair and start wearing the kind of pants that don’t have a fly or even a tag in the back, because they’re so shapeless it ultimately doesn’t matter how you put them on. Pants that, in their lack of structure, mirror your sad, eggy days.

My husband suggested I find something to do that wasn’t work or rattling darkly around the house like a premenstrual ghost. He had the gall to suggest I join a running club, or sign up for some kind of “class” at a “gym.”

Now, I know a lot of people enjoy this kind of thing, but to me, exerting myself physically in a choreographed fashion, accompanied by four to thirty strangers and the music of Taylor Swift, is not “restorative.” It is what happens to you in hell if you steal from a food bank.

Compounding my usual jobless moldering was the fact that I’d also recently tried unsuccessfully to sell two television shows, and had a series of dispiriting meetings with television executives who seemed, at best, a little down in the dummps themselves, and at worst, to actively wish that they were living another life, one in which they were someone else entirely, and I was dead.

Now, I’m very used to getting no’s or shrugs or blank stares, or seeing the reflection of Instagram stories flit by in the spectacles of the people I’m in a Zoom with. But I had a particularly demoralizing encounter after I’d soft-pitched an idea I’d been thinking about after talking to a friend who’d recently returned from six months at a remote research station at the South Pole.

He’d described it a little bit like spending a year on Mars; remote and inhospitable, packed with charming weirdos and social turmoil. There were scientists and government grunts, there were PhDs who took jobs as garbage men and toilet cleaners for the privilege of experiencing stultifying isolation and genital numbing cold. People with anxiety or other common neurological issues were discouraged from participation because it was sometimes hard to get medication, so many people lied about having neurological conditions and went anyway.

I thought it seemed like a good place to set a thirty minute sitcom, and, with my friend’s blessing, fashioned what I thought was an interesting story that was totally different from my friend’s experience and more of a “broadcast or streaming” version of that. The next time I was in a meeting with a television executive, I casually mentioned the idea, adding in for good measure a “puzzle box” element and a “workplace” element and a family/hangout/YA element.

I expected her, if not to lean in with interest, to at least nod in acknowledgment and say something like “Oh, cool” or “Fun” if she wasn’t interested.

But she didn’t. “Yeah, sorry,” she said, shaking her head to rouse herself, as if she’d just eaten a big turkey dinner. “It’s just, we’re kinda doing that idea already.”

I was surprised by this. “Even the part with the bisexual love triangle? And, the smuggled tortoise? And the French fur trapper?”

“Yeah, pretty much that exact thing,” she replied. I tried to push through my surprise, and asked her, as you’re supposed to at this point, what types of ideas she and her coworkers were looking for, then.

“Hm” she said. “The only advice I can give you, in this market, is to try to think of something really bold that nobody has ever done before.”

If it’s true that there are only seven basic stories, there must be even fewer funny stories. So, as a comedy writer, you can never be too steamed that someone has gotten to one before you. Most modern humor is rooted in the idea that human beings experience a fairly limited number of circumstances: we go to airports, give and receive bad blowjobs, have periods, hate our wives, love our wives, cheat on our wives, get new wives, cheat on those wives, etc. Seeing that someone has beaten you to an idea is simply part of the job, much in the way being kicked in the face must be for someone in the UFC.

This is maybe why I took this executive’s response particularly personally. Because, I know. I know! I know we live in an age drained of frontiers artistic and natural. I know we founder helplessly in a void of human wonder as dumb little robots vie to rob us of our remaining vivid experiences. I KNOW. So, oh, you’ve heard an idea like this one before? YOU DON’T SAY. And I should come up with a new one instead?

I mentioned this phrasing “thing of something that nobody has ever done before” outrage to a TV writer friend, and he said, “There were actually TWO competing Antarctica rom coms in like, 2016 or 2017. And then a few before that, I think, too? Maybe four or five, total. Give or take.”

I said, probably a little too crisply, “I think you’re missing the point.” I felt sometimes that I’d long gotten past the point of coming up with ideas that I loved, that felt clever or imaginative, and had settled for ones that I thought I could sell based on their ability to keep a 67-year-old dad from shutting off the television for an extra 23 minutes after Thursday night football, instead of going into the computer room to masturbate.

“And not for nothing,” I added, “Antarctica is a large continent. This was set in the South Pole. It’s a distinct geographic location.” My friend gave me a sad look that said, “Maybe you should join an exercise class.” I realized, not for the first time, that I was experiencing “sour grapes” and or what’s also commonly known as “being a bitter old bitch.”

My husband likes to go to jiu-jitsu when he gets like this. He has a studio on Melrose that he loves that smells like feet, where he relieves tension by having big sweaty men in courduroy pajamas give him rug burn on his eyes. He’s always trying to get me to go and “find my version of that.” I’ve been waiting my whole life to find the group athletic pursuit that doesn’t make me feel like I’m in that Stephen King novel where tweens get shot to death for walking too slow, and I was afraid I was finally going to have to do it this time. I just didn’t like who I was, or where I was headed (“a bitch” and “Big Huge Bitchville,” respectively).

Thankfully, that’s when I found the lake.

How do I describe it? There isn’t a good way to do it justice — it was a sprawling, manmade reservoir in a public park about thirty minutes out of central Los Angeles, and it was perfect. For the bargain price of $5 handed to a bored teen at an entrance booth, you were rewarded with blissfully deserted parking lot and placid miniature beach. The entire thing was maybe the size of a Target parking lot, surrounded by trees and chicken-milanese-colored hills.

A few times, I caught an adorable little dump truck hauling in more sand, but otherwise, there was little noise that didn’t come from the few animals or human beings who’d come to cool off.

I was never totally alone, of course, but it was sparsely attended enough to feel unsullied by the metropolitan masses nearby. A few handfuls of couples or families came by to swim and eat containers of cubed watermelon, but the beach was roomy enough that anyone could shake our blanket of sand or speak at a gentle volume without it reaching anyone else. There was a generous section of the water roped off for swimmers, with ample room beyond for a small number of paddle boats and kayaks that glided serenely around the periphery. Sanderlings and wading birds hopped up from the bank and close enough to human visitors that I could see the beads of water on their tertial feathers, and hawks cruised above in lazy circuits.

Every day I’d bring a falsa blanket and two cans of coconut Lacroix that would get progressively warmer until it started to taste pleasantly of suntan lotion, and a rolled-up New Yorker that was mostly for show. I’d mostly just lie there and think, and when it got too hot, I’d swim laps, trying half-heartedly to keep my head above the water, because, at peace or not, my brain will always return to an article I once read in Southern Living, about brain-eating amoebas lurking in bodies of still water. You just don’t forget that kind of thing.

I went to the lake as often as I could and swam as much as I could. Maybe this, the solitude, the gelid embrace of manmade waves in the hopefully organism-low lake water, was what I needed to neutralize my hostility and disappointment with the world. To do my thinking — or not thinking — in the quiet.

And quiet it was, mostly. There were a couple of young lifeguards who sat in a rickety tower, but one liked to paddle out on a surfboard and float toward the middle of the cordoned-off swimming area, casually watching little kids bob in their floaties near the concrete shallows, or giving his whistle a languid toot if lap swimmers got too close to the stanchions. I’d look at that sunburnt kid lolling around in the big fake lake and think to myself, Now there’s an honest gig. There, I forgot about work, and rejection, and rejection at work. I only felt the hot sand in my ass crack and heard the cry of whatever bird had flown above with a mouthful of funnel cake from the nearby Six Flags.

And, like many a middle-aged overeducated idiot before me, I began to think of the lake as a place I’d personally unearthed for my private pleasure. Yes, it appeared on maps and had salaried employees, and there were already a handful of other people milling around and enjoying it on any given day, but no one I knew seemed to be aware of it. I felt the thrill of discovery, like Amundsen at the South Pole, or Shackleton at a totally distinct part of Antarctica, because again, it is a large land mass, and, with a little imagination, you could almost set two, equally good television comedies there.

One day I found myself, as usual, one of only a few visitors to the little beach, but one of them was a family of four who had a huge picnic of tupperware foods spread out near the shore. The father, or who I assumed to be the father, waded along the shoreline drinking a beer and humming the chorus part of “I Gotta Feeling” on repeat. When he walked by me, he smiled and said, “Good afternoon. How’s your day?” It’s a testament to the power of this lake that I was neither annoyed by the music or this intrusion into my 500th attempt to begin a Curtis Sittenfeld short story in the magazine before getting too sun-dumb to read.

“Pretty nice. You?” I replied.

The man was well-tanned, wore wraparound shades and had a tattoo of barbed wire that encircled his ribcage, just above a large, ombre belly. “Man, it’s my day off,” he said, with a little whistle of contentment. “I got a cold beer, and I’m at the beach. Life doesn’t get no better than this.”

Indeed, it did not. Was it a dinky manmade lake with a crappy little fake beach? Yes, it was. But it was a little slice of paradise, where no one knew if I was unemployed and slowly having a nervous breakdown or just, you know, a woman in the middle of a weekday on a dirty yoga blanket, pretending to read a magazine. And of course, it couldn’t last. The thrill of stumbling upon relatively unspoiled nature commingled with the irrepressible need for validation in a personal validation desert. One Wednesday, I posted a photo of my magazine and piping hot soda against the clear, shimmering water at the peak of a late-summer heatwave.

Where is this? and Where are you?! friends messaged, a level of interaction I normally wouldn’t get if I’d uploaded a Reel of myself in a trunk with tape over my mouth. Of course it did — I’d posted an accessible body of cold water, and it was hot. I wrestled with the urge to keep my “discovery” private, but ultimately, the spirit of generosity and illusory arousal of being first won out — I slipped the name of the park to a few friends. I know that nothing is mine, I know that the window for me to astonish the world is closing. My kids were starting school soon, and I wouldn’t be able to make it to the lake again that summer anyway.

I’m not completely delusional — I know that I had nothing to do with the two-dozen cars that appeared when I returned the next summer. The pastoral little parking lot where I’d once effortlessly founded a conifer-cooled space was packed and noisy, and that lake itself was aboil with rafts and those innertubes shaped like hamburgers and swans at popular at cloying airbnbs in insipid desert tourist towns. When I lay down my blanket to read as I had in many a peaceful afternoon past, a couple with torsos full of flash tattoos blasted a song from a portable speaker with the kind of thrumming beat and breakup-inspired lyrics that you might hear in a group exercise class in metropolitan Los Angeles. The wind blew sand from their blanket to mine, and an empty Erewhon smoothie cup rolled by in recrimination.

I know, there are very few original ideas. They are as few so peaceful and unpeopled that you can actually forget the world that exists beyond the surrounding pines — even if one of the trees is a cellphone tower poorly disguised to look like a tree. The world seems full of people eager to reject you and all too happy to take your little spot on the beach under the pine-tree-cell-phone-tower so they can play TikToks of Chris Fleming bits at top volume while shouting to their friend about how they “frankly disagree that there are too many podcasts.” There is no place to hide from other people, or yourself.

I will find somewhere else; I will come up with new ideas. But, surely, in this I’m not alone — surely everyone has experienced this vainglorious, humbling little loss of finding out you aren’t first and won’t be last. Surely everyone has their own version of having a sleepy woman tell them their idea is old and they are stupid for having it. Perhaps the unfeeling, heedless world has also stolen something of yours, taken a joke, an idea for a new kind of mop, a signature outfit, the plot of a novel, a movie, a melody, a karaoke song, or even a lake, from you.