I mentioned in an article last fall that, one day, I’d like to invent something. At the time, I didn’t know what in particular I wanted to invent; I just knew that I wanted to cook up a handy gadget, get it patented, sell the patent, and let a good-looking, scantily-clad man peel me a grape or two while I watched the money roll in. In the service of coming up with a lucrative invention, I started keeping a list of possible widgets and contraptions with which to make my fortune, but I didn’t have a breakthrough until this weekend, when I stopped dead on the Summit-station train platform and yelled down at my right foot, “Okay, NOT – in order to go around calling yourself an ‘adhesive bandage,’ you must BANDAGE MY FOOT, preferably by ADHERING TO IT,” and as my fellow passengers gave me “whatever, Nutty Arbuckle” looks and went out of their way to avoid walking too close to me, a light-bulb in the shape of a raw, throbbing, sandal-related blister clicked on above my head. Eureka! I’d patent a Band-Aid, but with Krazy Glue on it! I’d call it the Krazy-Aid! It wouldn’t come off – ever! It could come with a bitty little tube of paint thinner for removal purposes!

Yeah, yeah, I shouldn’t put Krazy Glue directly on my skin. Whatever. I’ve tried every conceivable brand and variety of adhesive bandage. I’ve tried Curad. I’ve tried flexible fabric. I’ve tried the special cut-out kind for knuckles that Johnson & Johnson charges more for even though it requires almost no extra time or money to die-punch the little flaps. I’ve slapped every damn Rugrat, Disney animation, and Nickelodeon character on various parts of my feet and hands, and I would like to know exactly what I have to do to get an adhesive bandage to stay on for more than five minutes, because I don’t think I should have to put on a Band-Aid, pin it to my foot with two industrial carpet staples, wrap packing tape around it, tie it up with binder twine using every knot in the Boy Scout manual, and dip the whole kit and caboodle in vulcanized rubber, just so I can walk a half mile without my shoe filling up with blood. I would also like to know why the Band-Aid refuses to stick to MY skin, but will happily attach itself like a sticky little barnacle to the skin of the cow that comprises my shoe and refuse to come off without taking half the shoe’s upper with it, and how it knows that I’ve left my apartment, because I could walk back and forth across my studio a hundred thousand times without so much as a peep from the Band-Aid, but the minute I lock my front door behind me, pffffffft! I’ve seen Post-Its with a more tenacious grip. (Meanwhile, the average corn-removal pad will not budge except for the jaws of life. Huh?) And to top it all off, because the Band-Aid hasn’t stayed put, I have to walk in such a way that the blister doesn’t get any more rubby and hurty, which in turn causes other blisters in weird places, like on the ball of my foot, and if a Band-Aid won’t stay put on my toe . . . you get the idea. So, I’d like to invent a kind of Band-Aid with a space-age Jetsons-type polymer that will bond with the skin on my feet until death do us part, and perhaps become one with my feet on a molecular level.

Devoting as much time as I do to daisy-chaining Curads together, fun-tacking gauze to my toes, and other forms of blister management, I don’t have as much time as I’d like for other personal-care items on the agenda. Take flossing as an example. I try to floss regularly; it only took one dental appointment involving a chisel and a rubber mallet to strengthen my commitment to waxed string. But I’d like to speed up the process by crafting a little mouthguard-esque doohickey that flosses all the teeth at the same time. You pop it in like a retainer, the floss goes between all the teeth at once, you pop it out and rinse it off – start to finish, ten seconds. And because it’ll make flossing so quick and easy, many more people will floss every night, and dental health in the US will improve, and I’ll get rich.

From the cumulative time I’ll save on flossing, I’ll have time to perfect various ways of cleaning the bathroom without ever setting foot inside. I briefly considered bioengineering – breeding those little snails tropical-fish owners use to clean their fish tanks so that the snails would snack on mildew, and then I could just line a bunch of them up in the shower and leave for the day – but I didn’t know what I’d do with the snails when I didn’t have any work for them. Where would I keep them – the fridge? The toilet tank? So I abandoned that plan in favor of remote-controlled cleaning aids. I know how unbelievably lazy I sound, but truly, I can’t even get to certain places in my bathroom because my elbow only bends the one way. I have never cleaned behind my toilet, because I can’t get back there. I’ve tried clutching a scrub brush between my toes, I’ve tried tying it to a jointed mop, I’ve tried strapping it to the cat and throwing one of his catnip mice back there, but nothing works. I need one of those little robotic things from Star Wars that skittered around the hallways of the Death Star, but with a rotating brush on the bottom. The way I envision it, I’d charge it up, pour a pint of Top Job into the chamber on the top, set it on “scour,” and steer it back there. Then I’d run it through the tub. It could do the whole bathroom, and the kitchen, too. If I get the patent on it, I’d specify that it have two types of brush, a hard one for the bathroom and kitchen and a softer one so people could use it to wash their cars. On a sunny Saturday afternoon, I can go outside with a lounge chair and a cold soda and catch some rays while the little brush-on-wheels washes the Honda. Once I finish that prototype, it’s on to the Dustboni. It works like a Zamboni, except that instead of smoothing down ice, it dusts wooden surfaces; instead of spraying hot water, it sprays Pledge; instead of a rubber fin thingie in the back to tamp the ice down, it uses a rag to wipe up dust and lint. I’ll put in a little driver’s seat so that kids can stick their GI Joe figurines in the top if they want to. I’ll even program it to play songs from “Jock Rock.” The SkyMall catalog will carry it, and bored business travelers will buy it for the hockey fans in their lives. Laugh all you want, but whoever invented those dancing flowers made a mint, and those don’t even do housework.

Much though I’d like to cut down on laundry by inventing a line of clothing with a built-in force field that automatically suspends spaghetti sauce in a hover formation above the fabric, I don’t know enough about particle physics or electrical engineering to get that to work. The same goes for the dime-sized armpit fan . . . and the dog-crap atomizer (think vamps getting dusted on Buffy) . . . and the personal cloaking device . . . and the PPS, or Potables Positioning System, which determines your location and then sends you to the nearest bar that has seats free and toilet paper in the ladies’ room . . . and the battery-operated stench-neutralizing keychain, which you might not think you need, but the next time you get onto the elevator by yourself and float an air biscuit, only to have the doors open and bust you two floors down, don’t even think about stealing my idea . . . yes, I think I need outside help. Maybe I could hire a physicist to consult on those projects. I definitely plan to hire a microbiologist to help me with my food-gone-bad detector. My paranoia regarding the possibility of food poisoning knows no bounds, to the point where I will throw out not only spoiled food but also any food that sat next to the spoiled food in the fridge, as well as any food starting with the same letter as the spoiled food. I have opened vacuum-sealed cans, not liked the look of the contents, and thrown them away for no good reason. Nothing ever passes my sniff test, so I don’t know why I even bother with it. I’d like to have a device that determines for me whether a given food has gone to the dark side. Maybe a litmus paper-type arrangement, or an apparatus shaped like a turkey thermometer that measures the level of microbial activity in leftovers. Once I hone the technology, I can arrange to have it built into storage containers, along with a voice chip that says, “Danger, Will Robinson!” if I open a Tupperware of skunked casserole. I can even design one for restaurant-goers and package it with the next edition of Zagat’s. We’ve all lived in fear of company-picnic potato salad for long enough, people.

And I think we’ve all knuckled under to the tyranny of magazine subscription cards for long enough as well. Until someone passes a law that mandates a maximum of one subscription card per publication, I’ll just get to work making those obnoxious cards more fun. I’d like to make them out of flash paper, but I have a feeling that violates a fire code or two, so why not print them up on one side with paper-airplane instructions or origami folds? Don’t want to subscribe to the New Yorker? No problem – a few quick creases and you’ve got a swan. Surely I can find a way to turn these little irritants into something amusing – printing them up with trading stickers, or putting a crossword puzzle on the back.

I have a ton of these dorky ideas. Of course, most of them constitute variations on the cattle prod (for use on people who answer their cell phones in a movie theater) and the Clapper (installed on my computer, my Zippo, my coffeemaker, and in the shower and the elevator in my building), but I have to start somewhere. And if anyone out there has a contact at the FDA, please let me know, because I’d hate to have done all this research on the Beeroderm patch for nothing.

Martinoderm? Tequiloderm? Okay, it needs work.
I am not stuck on Band-Aid brand, because Band-Aid is not stuck on me. Dammit.

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