The Internet and the Nightmare

When I discovered my passion for writing in the first years of my college life, back Van Halen -in 2002, with a diploma in Information Tech underway, I was able to pen down on average a thousand words per day, regardless of the medium. As I had just only left high school for a few months, I was still in the stage of relying on pen and paper, and the computer at home served no other purpose than to entertain and to supply porn.

It's been four years now, and I've recently graduated from a Bachelor of Information Tech, a far cry from the total computer newbie that I was less than half-a-decade ago. I'm more savvy in a sense than before, more versed in the skills of computery stuff, as I would tell most people, just how lawyers would tell me that they're proficient at lawyery stuff. Because to each his own, and everybody is their own layman.

But back to the course of writing, starting out with a ballpoint pen in my hand and a piece of paper in front of me. Ideas would form in my head and they would transmit all the way down to the fingers that worked the instrument, the words just spilling out from either the dark end of nowhere where Lovecraft resides, or the far-reaching skies of Tolkiendom. My work was amateurish, laughable when it came to expressing true emotion and thoroughly unrealistic, if I were to look back on it today, fueled by the musical inspiration known as Van Halen.

It started off with sci-fi, where I had registered for an online text-based MMO called Taenaria Derivia Zallus Kitara (TDZK for you acronym-lovers out there), and ultimately joining an alliance which went by the name of the Integrated Guardian Fleet (IGF, if you wish to reminisce). It was a fair bunch of fellows, drafted from all corners of the Internet-verse, a world that I was unfamiliar with, perhaps because I spent 90 percent of my surfing before that discovering names like Sung Hi Lee, Jenna Jameson, Anna Nicole Smith, and oh, you get the idea.

To think there was actually a world that had existed wonders such as MUDDs, Vulgusfilter, Slashdot, Kuro5hin, Unix, as well as all manner of exploiting browser bugs (for which I will be thankful to Nemu for starting this spark-thing inside). The Internet was actually used for something else other than porn! The very thought of it was incredible, and I perhaps felt the wonders of the Internet, just how most people should have felt when they touched a keyboard for the first time in their lives. Something like sex. Well, no, not like sex, but in the knowledge sense of things, well, maybe a little like sex.

It turned out that quite a majority of the members of the IGF belonged to an online writing guild known as the Illuminati, and to say the least, their sense of humour was bizarre, yet not altogether a turnoff. They revelled in pieceing together words from their rather strange minds and churned those thoughts into paper, or as in this case, the screen. Cyberpunk shot out from the ground where they walked, the same way daisies and sunflowers would when the ancient gods of nature would walk the earth. Their style was personable yet it often told of destinies propelling through the universe, changing the world around them forever.

And so I joined the Illuminati a short while after I joined the IGF, making acquaintances and friends along the way, all the while coming with my millenial-number of words per week, comparing myself to the likes of other writers who had years/months before them. My writing improved heaps as I picked up the abandoned childhood pastime of reading, gaining knowledge through fiction, non-fiction, articles and the like. You can say I was fully motivated at this point, and I strove to rise to perfection, even if I really wasn't that good at what I did, but I enjoyed it.

Fast forward to today. I find it hard to come up with an idea, the concept of some writing block always in front of me, and to even type down a few words that would amount to something, an engaging storyline, a scene with captivating characters, anything worth reading, seems just so hard to do. I would amount this sense of constant failure to losing the circle of writers that I have once been ordained into. Not that they've kicked me out or anything, but just that each and every one of the members seemed to fade away into oblivion or some equivalent, with real life looming over their foreheads. Responsibilities and obligations, I suspect are one and the same, and they affect us all, including myself, and somehow along the way, they just seem to sap out the life from under us and pull us away from what it is that we were meant to be.

It's just that I kind of felt destiny at my fingertips, once. Now I feel bored.


Currently listening to: Twisted Sister - O Come All ye Faithful


I think I got my inspiration back. =D