Lost Ideas

I had a Google Document with about 100 ideas for posts. I'd had the same 100 ideas for about two years, and any day that I couldn't come up with something, I'd spend 10 minutes floating through the list trying to find something that I could turn into a passably amusing anecdote. Then one spring day, I purged my Google Docs page, eliminating everything that I have no need for. It wasn't until a week later, when I couldn't come up with a blog post idea, that I realized I'd deleted my master 'idea list.' When you accidentally delete a short story or don't write down an idea and later can't remember your logic, it's at first not much of a big deal. Then a day or two passes, and those ideas begin to seem like that had real gravity -- like this new stuff just isn't measuring up. Then a month later, you realize that you could have spun the next Great American Novel and an award-winning Bud Light ad campaign out of those notes -- what a loss for humanity. I just hope those ideas are never recovered and I'm proven wrong.