A Writer's Nightmare

Sometimes when I write, I have to stop to convince myself that I am not unwittingly committing plagiarism. What if, my little demon would nag, what if every word and phrase I am writing now has been written before? What if those ideas in my head are only memories of has-beens? My fear is that one day, while browsing in a bookstore, I find my stories in a book, verbatim, written years ago by another author. Even worse, what if I find that author's ideas boring, banal, and shallow? I would be happy if I could recompose the words of Faulkner or Cervantes. That would be a great feat. But what if I discover my writing in the back of an old smutty magazine, used as filler in between pictures of fake tits and bad tattoos?

These words I am typing now, are they original? Does this entry appear on other blogs? Myspace? Livejournal? I thought of parsing this into Google, but I am afraid of what I might find.

Perhaps in the future, all writing will be done as a Google search.

Future according to Sci-fi

Here is a list of science fiction visions for the future.

Apocalyptic wasteland: Mad Max. Terminator. Waterworld.
Cyberpunk metropolis sprawl: Neuromancer, Matrix, Ghost in the Shell.
Enlightened Utopia: Star Trek.
Utopia with a twist: Brave New World. Gattaca.
Dystopia: 1984.
City-state as microcosm: Land of the Dead, Aeon Flux, Battlestar Galactica.
Space westerns: Star Wars, Cowboy Bebop, Firefly, Alien.

Am I missing anything? I consider the cyberpunk one to be most likely, mixed in with a little bit of utopia or dystopia depending on where you live.

I'm aware of my tongue

Wonderful article from the Guardian by Charlie Brooker:

Sometimes I feel giddy at the thought of being alive

I need to find that Peanuts strip he refers to.

Beauty

I can't see beauty in things anymore. The flowers, the clear night sky, a girl's smile, they no longer stir my senses. It's as if my sense of beauty has been amputated, with only a stump left to remind me what was lost. But last night, in a dream, I found it again. I was riding a bus home and had gotten off at the wrong stop. I started to walk uphill, and the slight exertion heightened my sense of smell. Trees lined the sidewalk, and they were in full bloom. As I walked closer, the branches drooped and the flowers brushed against my face, my ears. The flowers glowed, like little angels, all around me, and for a moment that was everything, the whole universe. I closed my eyes and woke up.

That's all I can remember.