STORY IDEAS I WISH I HADN'T THOUGHT OF

I can't help it: every once in awhile an idea for a story pops into my head that's just completely stupid. Not silly--I like silly ideas--but stupid, the kind of idea that makes me feel like I lost an IQ point just by conceiving it. An idea like...

THE FURRY

Otto Mellon likes to pick up chicks dressed up as a giant pink squirrel. His attitude: if you've got a problem with that, well, tough.

Several Harry Potter fans actually do have a problem with that, at least when he's hanging around with his similarly attired buddies stinking up their favourite sci-fi con. As a prank, they jump Otto, tie him up, and dump him in the local chemically-polluted reservoir, their theory being that it won't make him smell worse.

The reservoir's ooze has a chemical reaction with Otto's sweat and his squirrel costumes synthetic fibres. When Otto crawls from the muck, he discovers he's bonded with his costume on a molecular level--he can't take it off.

From here, we could go two ways, superhero or horror. In the case of the former, Otto dons a cape and fights for "his people's" right to party. If we want to go horror, we modify the title slightly to THE FUR(R)Y, have Otto go insane and take horrible vengeance on the fantasy-lovers who tossed him in the gunk.

Either way, shortly after I finish writing the story, I cut my own fingers off as an act of penance.

***

"AND THEN I GOT MAD..."

The thing that was bugging me last week? Chris Handley, a long-time manga collector and by all accounts not a pedophile at all in Iowa, is facing up to fifteen years in prison for attempting to read wholly fictional material.

If that wasn't enough to get my blood boiling, Dick Cheney's out and about not getting arrested for coordinating the torture of real people while Obama's done an about-face and decided not to release photographic evidence of rape of prisoners in Abu Ghraib.

If real people being really raped qualifies obscene (and I kinda think it has to), it follows that the President of the United States is in possession of real obscene material.

But it's a comic collector who's likely going to prison, because drawings of things things that don't exist having intimate relations with each other, well, society's got to draw the line somewhere, right?

A