pick a nose, any nose

So I was thinking about being a motivational speaker or something. I can talk pretty good and I don’t mind getting up in front of crowds. I was in a band when I was younger. Well, marching band. Same thing sort of, you have to get up in front of people and perform… just without the gay spandex. Well, the uniform was pretty gay with the hat and all so I guess it’s a wash.

Maybe motivational speaker isn’t what I meant. The kind of speaker that gets up in front of a bunch of people looking for advice on how to live their life based on a simple metaphor or needing inspiration to overcome their shitty life or something is more of what I was thinking.

Here’s why. I came up with a great one the other day. A metaphor. Most people would think that people who pick their nose and eat it would need a 2 step program to stop. Just makes sense. You’d need to stop the urge to pick your nose and you’d definitely need to stop wanting to eat it right?

Wrong!

You only need to figure out how to stop picking your nose. You can still want to eat boogers but if they are still inside your nose you can’t get at them. You see what I’m getting at?

You don’t need a 2 step program at all. You just need the 1 step: stop picking your nose. Picking is the only way to get at the snot inside it so if you can stop picking you’ve got it licked.

Can’t you almost see a guy in a nice suit walking back and forth on a small stage at some Holiday Inn meeting room laying this information on you for only $15? That guy could be me. There has got to be a dozen things that you could compare that strategy to.

I’ve done my homework. I’ve sat and thought about all the other possible ways to get snot out of your nose and picking is the only way I could come up with. Using a pencil or tweezers still counts as picking, picking is a verb not a noun like finger. Unless you say something like “pickings are slim” where I think that makes it a noun but that wouldn’t be applicable (a great word for a guy to say in a suit and holding a microphone) because if you stopped picking your nose the pickings would be bountiful (another 5 star word) in an unpicked nose.

The best part is that I don’t need to go into a great deal of detail on how to stop picking your nose. I could just find someone in the audience to admit that they pick their nose and then yell at them to stop until they cry or fall to their knees and promise not to do it again. The ‘why’ they stopped isn’t as important as the message of now they don’t need to stop wanting to eat their boogers.

Like I said, there has got to be a dozen things you can use an example of this plan in action. Take for example the guy who drinks and drives. That’s a popular disease these days and chances are there will be a few of those folks in any audience. All I have to do is show them that it’s ok to drive as long as they stop drinking beforehand.

POW! Point made.

It’s not the driving that’s bad, just like it’s not the wanting to eat your boogers that’s bad. It’s the act of eating them that is bad just like it’s the drunk part of driving. Just typing this has me all excited about having an assistant changing the slides as I make each point. You know, one of those kick-ass Power Points where I can show a diagram of the nasal cavity and then a car all smashed and twisted around a tree. Making lots of eye contact and peppering the speech with dramatic pauses. I can stand in front of them and pretend to be going through some huge internal debate, raising and lowering my finger to my nose as they all gasp and wonder which direction I’m going to go.

I’m telling you, this idea is gold. You can still want to do drugs, just don’t buy them and you can’t do them! You can still want to go out and have sex with strangers but if you lock yourself in a trunk you can’t leave the house. You can want to surf just don’t learn to swim. Keep that finger out of that nose and you’re fine. Shit, there’s the book title right there!

Maybe get an actor to pretend they are a psychologist in a TV commercial saying what a breakthrough idea this is and how everyone should hustle down to the Holiday Inn this Wednesday at 8 so they can get their shit straight by listening to me. Of course, I’ll run a disclaimer at the bottom of the screen admitting that the psychologist isn’t a psychiatrist and instead is an actor but I’ll make it so small that an eagle with its beak pressed right up against the screen couldn’t read it.

You see, I can still want to help people as long as they are willing to pay for it.

There’s a perfect way to end this but I just can’t seem to put my finger in it.