What do you get when boredom, a wild imagination and a Bic pen cap collide?
I don’t recall exactly when, but sometime in elementary school I had a dramatic revelation of life changing implications. The universe would never be the same. The thread worn fabric of space time unravelled before my eyes. It has been said that the pen is mightier than the sword. Well I have news for you, the pen cap is mightier than the laws of physics. Yes, the very laws of physics were warped and morphed before my eyes.
It was probably in a social studies class or maybe math, certainly nothing important, that boredom collided with my wild imagination at the very moment I pulled the blue cap off my pen and set the pen down in that little slot we had on the old school desks. You know, the groove across the top of the sloped desk to keep pens and pencils from rolling noisily onto the floor at which point the teacher would surely know that our minds had drifted to far away places.
With my pen secure in it’s idle place, it dawned on my that the cap was sleek and aero dynamic. It could be the nose cone of a rocket ship or a physics defying intergalactic spaceship, a gift from some alien race. Sometimes it was an airplane, a lumbering giant or a nimble fighter. Yes, may a dog fight was won by the cap of my pen. It took flight as often as my teacher was looking the other way.
I’m sure if my teachers knew what was racing through my young mind they would have grounded me at once. I also might have done better in the two previously mentioned subjects. But before you scoff and mock me, have you ever noticed that the Virgin Galactic space craft looks strangely like the cap of an old Bic pen?
May you find inspiration in the ordinary.