August 27, 2025–I must take a pause here to acknowledge hitting a milestone: This month marks the 20th anniversary of writing these Full House columns.
For those counting, that is 1040 original columns with never a missed week. Even during a 10-day stay in ICU, although I’m not sure those columns made sense.
The question most people ask upon hearing that is, “How do you come up with your ideas?”
I was listening to a Puzzler podcast when the guest was Emily Flake. She is a cartoonist for the New Yorker, and they asked her the same question.
Her response was that when she is stumped, she plays “What If?” She turns to the most mundane aspects of her life and deconstructs them, then reconstructs them, searching for humorous insight or fresh angles. Her example was “birds.” Everyone knows what birds are, but we take them for granted. Unless you are a birdwatcher, you probably don’t even see them flitting around your yard. What if, she posed, we considered the seagull? It is a common bird, and everyone is familiar with its look and lifestyle. But what if we imagined it as tiny as a hummingbird? Or as large as a pterodactyl? What if you had a seagull for a pet? Would you walk it on a leash? Wear it on a hat? Teach it to speak?
Would you feed it Purina Garbage Chow?
And so on. You can begin to understand the process of mining meaningful content from the flimsiest premise.
I believe every songwriter, poet, painter, and, yes, column scribbler lives in this world of continual observation and introspection.
Unconsciously, when you know you have a weekly deadline, when the homework is due on Monday morning, your mind constantly searches for new, suitable content. Better said, your mind recognizes new, suitable content. It is already all around you.
It is amazing how you can squeeze 700 words out of such mundane topics as dirt paths, processed cheese, beeping appliances, and night walks–all topics I’ve written about.
The point (finally!) is that this “seeking of ideas” is a good habit to nurture, whether you are a writer, cartoonist, painter, songwriter, attorney, teacher, seamstress, 4-H leader, or the guy who creates puzzles for a podcast. Your mind scans, recognizes, and interprets patterns that are all around you, automatically processing them into something new and previously unformed. I imagine comedians become quite good at this, being able to turn having a flat tire repaired into a 12-minute routine. Which is a topic I’ve also written about.
Those kinds of people keep a notepad on the bedside table, between the front seats of their car, and in the back of the hymnal. They never know when an idea will strike, and they have learned… oh, how they’ve learned… that no matter how fresh, exciting, and world-changing that idea is, if they don’t write it down immediately it will vaporize like the morning dew on a Texas July morning. I personally have thought up solutions for nuclear fusion, trisecting an angle, and how to communicate in a marriage, only to lose them all because I was in a Dairy Queen drive-through ordering an M&M Blizzard and couldn’t be bothered to write them down.
But do not despair! I agree with a breakfast companion who likes to state he has 1000 years worth of ideas and only 100 years left to do them.
The alternative? As someone recently posted in my social feed: “I go into a lot of homes each week. You guys would be surprised at how many people just sit in their house. That’s it. That’s their life.”
That’s a column.
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Phil Houseal is a writer and owner of Full House PR.
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Now marking 20 years of weekly Full House columns.