As I stir the ice in my rocks glass and take a sip of my apple juice I realize that maybe, just maybe, I have gone soft as the world has thrown a copy of a copy of a copy into the ubiquitous kiln of time and hardened it into clay.

I pretend to have a hang nail to give me something to do and realize that there are a few original ideas left. For example we could:

*write a movie with such witty dialogue and snappy repartee that everyone laughs through the lack of plot and dubs it a cult classic (a term that perhaps ironically, perhaps sadly, has nothing to do with real cults.). think about releasing the film in black and white.>>

*take whatever is popular and overdone and do it again... perhaps combine ideas. In the contemporary, I am thinking something involving dragons, orphans (or children whose horrible parents turn out to not really be their parents, and life is not horrible, they are not a loser, they are actually very, very special), penguins, and pirates. Perhaps a dragon riding penguin who was raised by pirates --but his father was killed by the worst pirate of all -- who, naturally, turns out to actually have been the father. If white doves are worked in-- bonus.>>

*give a book a title so pretentious it is painful not to read it. The Best Book You've Never Read or This Book WILL Change Your Life jump to mind.>>

*put a girl with her nipples showing on the cover.>>

*put a guy with his nipples showing on the cover.>>

*write about misunderstood youth, wasted youth, or the journey toward growing up and finding oneself. Use an exotic setting or a dire circumstance. Bonus if you can invovle fantasy/magic without ever really explaining how this came to be. --Double bonus if you write at least three books --each one a cliff hanger promising to explain it all in the next book-- where nothing really happens...>>

*write a tv show where one episode leads into the next. Best if working with a title that implies a finite storyline (Prisonbreak, 24, Lost, How I Met Your Mother) yet the story never, freaking ends. >>

I strongly feel these shows would be more to the point by skipping the whole cliff-hanger ending with extremely intense music during the closing credits by just rolling footage of a guy in a leather bomber jacket water skiing and jumping over a shark.>>

*Choose letters of the alphabet and title a book after each one. Ex: S is for Sue Grafton is an overpaid hack. >>

*Use numbers to come up with extremely creative titles for a series of high-stakes, face paced, thrillers with canned dialogue and action sequences as realistic as Ashlee Simpson's nose. Ex: 1st Response, 2nd Wind, 3rd Time's a Charm, 4 rhymes with Whore...>>

*Save all your internet chats (or myspace messages) for a year. Copy and paste them into a document, then organize it graphically so that each page looks like your web browser... and force a storyline out of it. Better yet steal these same year's worth of message from a 15 year old girl. >>

*Write a pile of crap that works best as a movie, include nudity, and wait for someone to buy up the rights.>>

*Use an excessive dose of sarcasm and cynicism with everything you write.




And as I wind down I wonder if I ran out of steam, if my juice ran out of punch, and if this train ever truly reaches its destination --assuming there was a heading when she berthed.