OMG -- A Celebrity Stole My Next Blog Idea!

So I sit down on a normal Saturday night, thinking about writing something funny and caustic at the same time. I want to hold a mirror up to the profligate, consumerist ways of the dominant paradigm, striking a chord of challenge and hopefulness, of crisis and opportunity, of blame and forgiveness. I want to riff on popular culture, impress with my command of arcana, and turn a deft phrase or two in the process. I start typing...

"We are all to blame. We are addicted..."

Hold on, this sounds familiar. I was perusing the HuffPo front page earlier in the day, but, nah. Forging ahead...

"...to the dope of credit, and each plastic card purchase sets off the phenomenon of craving for more. Then advertisers and marketers (lobbyists in better suits)..."

Now just a second -- I'm good, but not that good! Where am I getting this from? Okay, wait, I do have a couple of graduate degrees and all that -- plus oftentimes I am apt to deploy a biting wit in my writing -- so...

"...and the media tell us we need it and the banks and the credit companies tell us we can have it and boom -- we are all in over our heads. My fellow Americans..."

Sure, this is all me, no doubt. Geez, I've written stuff like this about media manipulation a million times before. Am I plagiarizing myself? Don't laugh -- I don't actually hold the copyright on some of my own work and thus have had to ask for permission to quote myself on occasion!

"...wake up and smell the new Starbuck's instant coffee. We all have a part in this. The climate crisis, the water crisis (in California) and the ongoing real estate and credit crises..."

Okay, what gives? I'm not from California -- in fact, I'm from a state that probably will go to war with California someday soon over dwindling water supplies (don't even think about it, Hollyweirdos -- AZ will kick your butts all the way to the ocean -- pick on Nevada instead; they're all drunk over there). The coffee line sounds like me, however: "C'mon people, wake up and smell the virtual coffee!" So does the invocation of a climate crisis, as well as a real estate crisis, not to mention a financial crisis. What's up?

"Can we radically transmute? Can we change? Do we really want to change? Are we going to change or are we going to just get back on the train and let it take us wherever it goes? We need to build new tracks, cleaner trains and return to a time of sacrifice and fortitude and grace and beauty. All aboard...?"

The call for change, a hint of optimism, the clever closing metaphor -- this is definitely me! I write things like this all the time, even alluding to trains now and then: "With the Bush train-wreck at long last getting ready to leave the station for good, it's hard to know precisely where to focus one's critical gaze amid the scattered carnage." Yes, I'm on solid journalistic ground here. Whew!

I asked a friend to read over my little diatribe. "Looks good, only I saw something just like this somewhere . . . yes, here it is . . . wow, it has 132 comments posted to it so far, nice work!" Which of course made it eminently clear that this wasn't my work after all, having never before broken 22 comments (and that's only because I was making fun of Rush Limbaugh -- but who's counting?) despite trying political wonkery, hip musical references, in-depth analyses, sardonic satire, poignant prose, vilification, deification, mortification, speculation, and plain old guile...

I glared at the screen in disbelief. There it was, witty title and all, my next blog idea fronted by a smiling celebrity visage, racking up comments that should have been mine! How in the heck do you get that many comments anyway -- or even that many readers? Hey, I know I'm just a little professor at a little college from a little town, and I have no illusions of fame or fortune here. Could this be some sort of weird John Malkovich moment, in which I have a direct line into a celebrity mind? We do have a closet in my house with a very tiny door, but...

No, it's even simpler than that. The offending party in this case -- let's call her "Jamie Lee Curtis," just for argument's sake -- has obviously been one of the 22 people out there reading my columns. My take on the current state of affairs likely seeped into her consciousness and certain turns of a phrase weaved their way subconsciously into her missives. Even though my blogs have appeared in the same queue as people like Alec Baldwin and Tom Hayden, my name wouldn't have registered for her and thus the ideas would seem to be simply "in the air." Without concern over attribution, these brilliant strokes could run right from me through JLC and onto the HuffPo front page. It's as if a big fish called Wanda had unwittingly swallowed up a little fish called moi. Or something like that.

Well, no hard feelings about any of this. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then subconscious celebrity bootlegging must be akin to adulation. Plus I finally figured out the secret to getting 132 comments on future articles: change my byline to read Jamie Lee Curtis! I mean, we're obviously sharing a brain already (Need more proof? My grandparents -- seriously -- were named Annie and Thomas. Now check out JLC's full bio. I'll wait...), and hey, what's in a name anyway? Note to all you bloggers out there toiling unappreciated in the nether regions of the net: find your celebrity intellectual doppelganger and surreptitiously repackage yourself!

Feel free to comment profusely, dear readers. Jamie and I appreciate your patronage...