The people over at Looney Labs have given me hope.

Somewhere over on Indian Lane in College Park, six employees go to work and design card games. It's not clear to me how these six people divvy up the work of coming up with ways to have a great time, but I'm sure it beats emptying septic tanks.

"Living the dream" can mean many things. For the purposes of this column, the phrase refers to the particular dream that involves going to work every day and doing something cool and being content with your life because you don't have to waste away slowly in a dead, gray cubicle. It seems to this humble columnist to be a pretty great dream to live.

And if anyone in this town is ripe for a profile to be done about them, it's the Looney's people. Serious journalists: get on it, because I'm just the column guy.

First of all, "Looney Labs" isn't just a misspelled attempt to say that their games are loony — that's their last name. Andrew and Kristin Looney, both former employees of NASA. Either that or they changed their names afterward to match the company's. Chicken or the egg indeed.

Their first game, from back in 1997, is called Fluxx, a game of apparent infinite complexity that I believe I would be obsessed with but never find anyone with whom to play. There are 100 cards in a deck, all of them totally gnarly. Some personal favorites, from the most recent edition of the game:

• Bread
• Sleep
• Creeper Sweeper
• Rules Escalation Meta Rule
• Interstellar Spacecraft
• Death by Chocolate

A game that incorporated one of these cards would be fun; I can't imagine a game that uses all of them. How could you POSSIBLY fit these things together? It's OK — the NASA people figured it all out for you. Also, I'm definitely going to try to slip a "You Also Need A Potato" into play next time I'm at the Texas Hold 'Em table.

But even cooler than the Fluxx cards is realizing that the Looneys made enough money selling them to quit their jobs building space shuttles. That's the dream, right there — whether we like it or not, money makes everything happen; everybody has to make some, and a few are lucky enough to make some doing something fun. Like making card games. LIVE THE DREEEEAM.

And it gets even better — there are different versions of the game! So once you get tired of throwing radioactive potatoes at your mother, you can move on to Martian Fluxx. Or Monty Python Fluxx ("buy this game or I shall taunt you a second time!"). Or — are you ready? — ZOMBIE FLUXX, with cards like "Eaten by a zombie!" and "Zombie baseball team." And when that gets boring, you can pep it up with their Flamethrower Expansion Pack, which comes with new Zombie Ballerina and Zombie Boy Scouts cards. What did YOU come up with at work today?

I was going to write about something else this week, but I had to change course when I stumbled upon Looney Labs. I've been inspired. The world needs ice-haulers and ditch-diggers, I suppose, but Looney Labs is proof that, with enough effort and brain power, you can make a living doing anything. They're living the dream.