Every so often I get asked where I go to get ideas for this daily column-writing assignment. It’s a good question for which I have no ready answer.
Ideas come from just about everywhere. Fortunately, Davis is a target-rich environment, which translates into a column-rich environment. There are some days, in fact, where I wish I had the space for three separate columns, so bountiful is the low-hanging fruit that’s out there.
It’s on those days that you have to pick and choose, deciding what needs to run today and what can wait until tomorrow. It’s not that what’s set aside is inferior, it’s just that it’s not as timely.
I have learned over the years that committing all ideas to memory is not a good thing. I may say to myself “I’ll never forget this topic,” and yet 24 hours later I can’t for the life of me remember what it was, other than something I was sure I’d never forget.
Very clearly, with 240 or so columns due every calendar year, it’s not smart to lose a potential topic.
Through painful trial and error, I’ve learned to scribble down an idea, sometimes in the middle of the night, in the hope it will still be viable in the light of day.
I then salt these ideas away in a simple plain vanilla manila envelope in anticipation of pulling them out on a slow news day and winning a Pulitzer Prize for my brilliant exposé of the county mosquito-abatement program.
The manila folder sometimes gets fat with ideas that have yet to come to fruition. I’ll flip through the folder in vain, saying “not today” to one idea and convincing myself I’m not in the mood for another, yet I’m reluctant to toss any of them into the garbage, lest I find myself desperate one day.
When one folder fills to overflowing, I pull out another, dutifully putting the start date on the outside so I know what day, year and month I’m dealing with.
The other day, during my once-a-decade desk cleaning, I came across a folder labeled “January 19, 2004,” presumably replacing the overstuffed 2003 folder that was no longer promising.
We’re talking nearly 10 years ago and, as I know from the photo that graces the top of this column, a lot can change in 10 years.
I mean, in 2004 Davisites were still happily drinking well water, our teeth were rotting away because there was no fluoride in that well water, The Davis Enterprise had yet to capitalize the “T” in “The,” Davis had only 200 pizza parlors instead of the 400 it has now and Dan Wolk was still in diapers.
Not to mention the fact that voting for yet another school parcel tax had yet to become an every-other-month exercise.
OK, carefully opening the 2004 folder to avoid getting dust on my typewriter, I see I saved a Davis Enterprise front-pager by the talented Beth Curda that was headlined “Council hopefuls split on growth.”
Sound familiar?
“Growth, housing needs and other citywide topics dominated discussion at what was designed to be a neighborhood-based forum for the Davis City Council race Wednesday evening,” Curda’s piece began as if it were written yesterday.
Discussion at the forum “broadened to address issues of community-wide interest, such as the proposed Covell Village project, hate crimes and diversity appreciation, residential development and housing needs, retail recruitment and district elections.”
Proof once again that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

— Reach Bob Dunning at [email protected]

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