Well, there goes my million-dollar idea. Some guy in Las Vegas is operating “Dig This,” a theme park for adults who always wanted to operate heavy machinery. For a hefty admission price, people can tool around on bulldozers and move objects from place to place with backhoes.

This is but a pale imitation of the concept that sprang full-blown into my mind years ago, because in “MachoLand” you would have been allowed to smash through brick walls and small buildings with the bulldozers and then march over to an area featuring artillery, machine guns and various heavy armaments.

Not sure how we were going to continually put those walls and buildings back together, but the operations committee would have come up with something.

The insurance committee also would have faced a good deal of pressure. I suspect firing 155-millimeter howitzer shells would have triggered liability premium payments resembling the special effects bill for “Transformers: Dark of the Moon.”

I would have tried to stimulate Iowa’s economy by placing the facility near an existing tourist spot, like Jordan Creek Town Center in West Des Moines or possibly Albert the Bull in Audubon. However, I must admit that Dig This has the perfect location. When you have to charge hundreds of dollars per customer just to stay in business, it’s probably better to tap into out-of-towners who are already in the mood to spend freely, plus drunk.

This is one of only two big-picture ideas I’ve ever had. The other one involves a stunning transformation of the energy industry, so don’t worry about me – that one should be worth a billion dollars, easy. The point is, I’m not going to come up with another entertainment breakthrough as fantastic as MachoLand, but somebody needs to, because we’re facing a major Baby Boomer crisis.

This one could be almost as cataclysmic as the previous one, when we graduated and realized there is no Comparative Literature industry. Everybody is worried about the future of Social Security, but the larger problem is that America is filling up with people in their 60s who are wandering around with nothing to do.

The last time this generation had time on its hands, we wound up with bell-bottom pants and the wisdom of Timothy Leary. Nobody wants to go through that again.

For decades, the prevailing theory was that golf would be sufficient to keep retirees from dropping by the office to reveal how things were done in the old days. However, statistics show that the number of people taking up golf each year is roughly equal to the number of people flinging their clubs into a water hazard and stomping off the course for the last time.

Maybe America should have stuck with shuffleboard. How well I remember the happy old folks at the shuffleboard court on the lawn of the Marshall County Courthouse. Although they seemed to do and say the same things over and over again, so they may have been an early version of animatronics.

For now, Baby Boomers have to share amusement parks with young punks who are able to go on spinning rides without spending the next hour lying on a park bench. It’s some kind of inner ear thing – I’m still waiting for the definitive amateur guide to otolaryngology – and it means half of the typical theme park is wasted on us. It’s annoying. The punks’ happiness, I mean.

Some bold entrepreneur is going to strike it rich by designing theme parks to suit retirees, replete with exciting rides that mostly go in a straight line and sideshows keyed to the appropriate cultural references.

Picture a Boomer with cash. Now picture The Keith Richards House o’ Fun.

Jim Pollock is the managing editor of the Des Moines Business Record. He can be reached by email at jimpollock@bpcdm.com