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.

Detachment

While outside, I have this feeling of separation from the concrete, the tangible. Everything seems filtered through a lens, as if I am viewing a memory or a dream. The morning commuters are usually perfect examples of realism, but to me they take on a film-noir tone. Their faces are obscured or expressionless masks. Vapor rises from the exhaust of a truck. Colors are dampened by the rain. Raindrops fall on the windshield. There are no details, only impressions. I am there, looking, hearing, smelling, but I feel like the present is already a memory, already fading, soon forgotten.

Untitled

These are my thoughts. They were my thoughts, but now they are memories. They were memories, but now they are uncertainties. They were uncertainties, but now they are nothing.