Ideaspace isn't yours, you know? It's a territory without maps and no guards watch its borders. You are not always alone with your thoughts. Your thoughts aren't really even your thoughts. They're waiting for you there at the end of a journey that's a race and a fight all at once. If you win, great. If not, start over.

More than a few times, I've started on something in varying degrees of seriousness, only to get trumped by an exploration of similar themes or ideas either in other comics or other media in general. It's always weirdly freeing-- like you're relieved of a kind of burden, or an unfinished task. You can cross it off the list. I have friends that get furious-- FURIOUS!-- when these things happen, when fate conspires to RIP OFF MY IDEAS, MAAAAN. I just feel freed.

The one straight-up science fiction idea I ever worked on was called RAZOR BABIES. I was never happy with the title. I knew, the second I started typing, that it had a shelf life. The ideas would start leaking out everywhere, if not the whole idea. Which it did eventually, most of all in that terrible Michael Bay movie THE ISLAND. It was different enough for me not to want to hang myself but the same enough to know RAZOR BABIES would never be. My obsession with Kansas City's criminal history, centering around the Union Station massacre, was so wonderfully explored in Ande Parks and Eduardo Barreto's UNION STATION that I actually thanked Ande for writing it.

Anyway, tonight an old idea of mine called REVISITOR was set alight and set free as I watched the just-won-an-Oscar THE LIVES OF OTHERS. It's a wonderfully taut, paranoid, compelling, lovely, awful, human, and fascinating exploration of surveillance, art, and defiance in the dying days of East Berlin. THE LIVES OF OTHERS-- while being as far away as can be from my hoary schtick-- hit on all the themes and ideas I wanted to explore, the mood and tone, everything. I imagine this to be the kind of movie that'd make both Kafka and Greene smile. It's a better, more capable, and more mature a thing than I ever could've made, and has now inspired my own thinking that much more.

Is that arrogant? I hope that doesn't sound arrogant. Goodnight, REVISITOR.

Go see THE LIVES OF OTHERS.

Also, I have bronchitis and laryngitis again.

Also also, I totally just spelled "bronchitis" and 'laryngitis' right the first time without having to spellcheck it or anything.