What's the big idea for the column? We ask Facebook friends

We love our Facebook friends. Every one of them. We had a bit of a brain-snag on Wednesday and were temporarily unable to come up with a column idea, so we asked our friends to give us an idea. No big deal. Eventually the muse resurrects herself and we’re back in business.

A few of the commenters alluded to our “writer’s block.” We don’t get writer’s block. Our problem is we tend to consume more history than we produce. We’ve strip-mined our past to the point where about the only thing in our life we haven’t written about was the time back in 1970 when we were backpacking with our friend Beard somewhere near Mammoth Lake and Beard spent the day trying to catch a trout and he finally caught one and we let it go because we suddenly felt sorry for the trout and its wife and children waiting anxiously for him to come home after a hard day of work. Beard was really mad at us, but that was more than offset by our imagined tearful gratitude of the trout family.

And the only reason we recalled that was because one of the suggestions from our FaceFriends was to write about “waterfalls of Yosemite,” and Mammoth was the closest thing to Yosemite we could find in our bag of experiences.

“How about why men die earlier than women?” suggested John Mauger. Men don’t go to the doctor as often, that’s one reason. Probably because of the prostate exam. Also, women advance their causes regarding medical issues and research better than men do. A man could never get the entire NFL to wear pink, for instance.

Michael Kevin Ceyar, suggested “which came first, the chicken or the egg?” The chicken came first. It says in the bible, probably, that God invented animals. The Easter Buy invented eggs.

“Dogs,” was Aie Casey’s idea for a column.

“Cats,” was Long Beach Mayor Robert Garcia’s suggestion. Specifically “mayoral cats.”

“If all else fails, coyotes,” wrote Eileen McCarthy.

Our by-far favorite co-worker Richard Guzman wrote, “How about a column on the heavy responsibility of being the shadow we all live under? Or the best ways one can go about getting tickets to your house.”

The shadow idea is a good one, and the responsibility would kill most men. As for the ticket to my house, we gave those out one time a few years back to a couple of reporters and we all almost lost our jobs as a horrible result.

“I just wrote an article on writer’s block, bu out and rekindling the passion,” commented Nicolas Zart. “In the end, I revisited something I used to love that led me to write about the things I write now. I’m having fun again revisiting my first love and it’s giving me new ideas on what to do next, or what to tackle next. Hope this helps.”

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Well, it does, at least in terms of getting us closer to the end of this column, at last.

Another suggestion, this from Alan Tolkoff: “How do writers pick subjects when they don’t have ideas?”

In the old days it was a lot harder, and you’d occasionally find a guy like Hemingway blowing his head off to solve the problem. Nowdays, it’s easier. Facebook is the new shotgun.

Contact Tim Grobaty at 562-714-2116, [email protected], @grobaty on Twitter.