I won’t spend nearly as much time inworld as I did before I bricked Arg’s hard head. It’ll be interesting to see how that works.

Predictions? Ambivalence is inversely proportional to amount of time spent inworld. Sl just isn’t as interesting as rl. Am I a prophet? Dunno. We’ll see.

Not so long ago, I pulled the trigger on an old friend. He was my first, and for a long time only, av in sl.

“Meh,” you’ll say. “So what?” Oh, I dunno. I’ll tell you if you stick around.

One of my first friends in sl was always counseling me. She would say things like, “This is a game. Ya gotta compartmentalize. Keep it separate from rl.” That seemed like good advice. I followed it for a while. For several months. Which is like nineteen years in sl, as many of you know.

My life in the metaverse was an extended sequence of playing different personalities through the same av. Sort of. I mean, I never committed to one or the other of those personae to the degree that a good roleplayer would have. I became aware after 194 days that I was becoming more an observer of potential selves than I was an actualized entity in the metaverse.

Attempting to play a role, I existed untrue to myself. I created and maintained myself as a ghost. A person who fades in and out of view, whom you can see, but can’t really touch.

I hate that. Passionately. Fuckin’ passionately.

Why do I hate it so much? Because it’s fundamentally dishonest. It’s not really what I want. And yet I chose to live like that. And you know why I really hate it? Because I realized that this is too much the way I live irl. I’m walking through my days mostly masked to myself. What am I really? Sl has shown me that I know a lot less about that than I want to believe.

I do love that, now. That crazy ability sl has to bring shit like that into focus.

“Why pretend to be something other than what you are? Why are you doing that?” Fear. Fear of rejection in a cold arena. Fear of not being cool. Fear of being completely irrelevant. A ghost driven to being a ghost by the fear of being a ghost.

Anyway, I murdered my av. ‘Twas a justifiable felicide. I thought I might attempt a resurrection, but I don’t think so now. Better to let dead cats rot.

So, what now? I can live in the metaverse, but not on my old and scared terms. I will be walking a different way now. I will be in sl what I really am, and not make apologies for that. Because one other thing I learned in sl (which really is a most excellent teacher) is that rejection happens. All the time. And it hurts. But not nearly so much as the feelings that come with trying to be what you’re not.

Being a ghost hurts worst. From now on, I’m resolved to be solid.

*chortle*

Excerpt:

“When, Im feeling kinda nerdy and want intellectual stimulation, my Illinois homeboy is my best outlet. Technical help and comforting thoughts, I turn to my Kitty Cat in Knoxville. My guys in Toronto and Calgary sure know how to make me laugh when Im having a hard time weathering a storm. There’s a guy I know in Argentina, that gives me respect and sincerity when I crave it. My Girl in Ontario, gives me an ethnic connection. And my faith will always be in California. I have a demon in a Bedford closet and a sweetheart in Tennessee. All of these relationships.. Are pixel.”

It’s good. You should read the whole thing.

SLove? I’m not sure I’ll routinely use the term, but my friend gets at something essential about sl.

Everything happens in sl, as Cindy’s commenter Benson so aptly puts it, in ant years. That is so true. The accelerated nature of the experience is part of what makes the word, and feelings associated with it, pop into our sl relationships so fast. Ain’t be too much time to reflect.

That sort of thing happens in rl too, but not as frequently or as fast. But I still think it’s love. I mean, what I mean by love. It’s no less so because it’s fleeting, or because, like everything else in sl, it’s going at warp speed, and therefore has a really short evolutionary cycle.

If we’re friends in sl, I’ll still say I love you after we’ve known each other for the relative eternity of 4 months. It might mean something different than it did when I first had the thought of it. It might have evolved from a not-very-successfully disguised infatuation to a good friendship. Heck, it might be slove (which, disturbingly, makes me think of Sammy Hagar), but whatever it is, I’ll claim it. It’s on the love continuum.

I want the best for the ones I love, whatever that best may be, and I’ll do whatever I can to see that happen. At least, I’ll wish for it.

I’ve been away from sl quite a bit lately. It’s the whole pace-of-life thing. Got a new job, so I’m on the steep ‘n greasy part of the learning curve with that. Got lotsa extracurricular stuff, too, so I’ve been short on time. So it’s been like a forced month-and-a-half-long vaca, with spotty exceptions.

The exceptions have been nice, but they’ve been brief, and time is everything in sl.

Of course, this is true of any kinda relationship. Just plain ol’ time with and proximity to the people you love are the glue that holds you together, that turns you and you into us. Common interests, attraction, fascination, sexual chemistry, intellectual chemistry, shared senses of humor, all of these things are catalysts. It’s time in the saddle that makes the horse and rider one.

And this brings up something really cool about sl, a key difference between sl and rl. It is much easier to spend much more time with your friends in sl than in rl. No question. That might be one reason everything in sl seems so accelerated. Relationships initiate faster, and they go further faster, in the 2nd than they do in the 1st. You can attribute this to a lack of inhibition, to natural tendency of virtual-world interactions to just blast right through barriers that would inhibit rl relational goodness. You might attribute it to the idea that sl is all about fantasies connecting with other fantasies. It isn’t real, right? So no matter what, no harm no foul. This gets at the heart of breaking down inhibition, of course.

But I think those things just get things started in sl. They’re the matches that light up the big fires. The fuel for the fires is time spent, inworld, interacting intensively witcho peeps, however you interact, and whatever you’re doing when you do.

Whadjoo say? “So what, Arg?” Is that what I heardja thinkin’? Mmm. I dunno. I think I’m saying all this to say, I am glad to have been forced to spend less time in sl. I think it’s been good for me to have the downtime. That downtime has been uptime in other ways. I’ve had more time to spend working on writing, I mean, stuff besides this blog. I’ve also learned from this less-intense sl period how much value time carries into my rl relationships.

Duh-moment? For sure. But I’m a pretty heedless person, and a weird sorta introvert/extrovert mix. It’s really easy for me to downplay the significance of time, and how I spend it, especially as it relates to spending it with peeps who are important to me. Sl, as always, is an excellent teacher. Here’s an example of what I mean: One of my sl friends loves to dance. So do I. We’ve gone dancing several times, and each of those times for about 3 or 4 hours. We danced and talked. And those times have been just so damn sweet. Profoundly so. I get so totally caught up in those moments that time becomes compressed. It’s like the effect you have when you drive waaay too fast on a really curvy road, and all the distances shrink so that what is really 400 feet away feels like it’s so close you could reach through the windshield and grab it, then, in an instant, it’s gone hissing by.

I come away from those moments goin’, “Man. I need to do that same kinda thing back here in the world-world.” It’s a good thing too. Me and this friend, we’re not new to each other anymore, so it’s not just novelty that makes this kinda thing so cool. It’s the deepening of the bond. It’s a good feelin’, ya know? It works in rl too. Unfortunately, you don’t get hours added to your day when you discover SecondLife.

Here’s another reason the vaca has been good. Sl is too intense in some ways for someone like me. If I spend too much time there, I really start to be there to a degree that’s probably not good. Rl and sl start to go all mergy on me, and I can’t stop that from happening. Maybe I’m mentally ill, I dunno. I do know that I live in my imagination a lot as it is, and that sl can overtake me very easily. This seems true in direct proportion to the amount of time I spend inworld. I could so easily become all about cybersex. I mean all about it. Those barriers I mentioned earlier? In rl, they push back at you, at least a little bit, almost everywhere. They don’t exist at all in sl. And, this is just my theory, the heart doesn’t know the difference between sex in rl and sex in sl. The body knows, I’m sure, but not the heart.

The more time I spent inworld, the closer I could feel myself coming to making rationalizations for involvements I knew I’d later regret. I could see it coming like a locomotive in the dark. And that scared me. I could feel myself goin’ outta control in a way that I don’t wanna. I think the present vaca has given me some distance that I needed to think about this clearly, to reassess my direction and decide. To decide.

But you know, I really miss sl, too. Popping in and out every now and then is just not the same as a long hot soak. I miss my friends. Some of them I almost never see, and the ones I do see more often, well, it’s just not the same. That makes me sad, but then that’s part of life, rl and sl. And I can live with that. In fact, it kinda makes life sweeter. Missing people is a very private experience, but it makes me realize how amazing and beautiful they are, and are the worlds we inhabit, both real and virtual.

Oh, yeah. Hat tip to Pajamas Media.

SecondLife. A corner of the metaverse where you’ll encounter some of the best people you’ll ever know. Where’ you’ll see astonishing creativity on display, side by side with the most wallowy Gatlinburgesque banality. Where Goreans intersect with vampires intersecting with furries intersecting with club kids. Where honesty is prized in people who are mostly fictive objects, where 3D avatars sometimes project personalities that are surprisingly one-dimensional, where, if relationships get seriously dramatic, you can choose to resolve them or you can just disappear. Poof!

Pretty weird, huh? Yeah, but it’s also compelling, intoxicating, addictive.

What if you’re the kind of person who naturally lives in your imagination? What if you’re a dreamer? Really creative? Mentally ill? Or just prone to suspend disbelief to an extraordinary degree?

It doesn’t really matter where you fall on that continuum. If you invest almost any amount of time and energy in sl, you are going to find your imagination fueling a unique kind of experience. You’ll participate in a kind of alternate reality that is made up entirely of projection and perception, and that seems, on the surface, to be fun and innocuous.

But. What if you suddenly realize that your self, not the virtual “you” of your self-consciously realized av, but your very own self, is being subtly shaped by your life in sl? We all know that we bring ourselves into sl, but what do we take with us when we leave?

See, when you log outta sl, you don’t leave your imagination behind. You bring it out with you. And what you’ve done with your imagination effects you in your rl. Subtly and profoundly. And that’s because the way you think and feel about yourself changes you. On the deepest levels. And in sl, you almost certainly will think of yourself in very different ways than you do in rl, at least than you did before you got a secondlife.

This might seem like such a “duh” moment. You may be thinking if you’ve stayed with me this far, “Dork. Of course the way you think effects the shaping of your self. All of your experiences do that. Virtual or not.” Or you may be thinking, “Meh. You’re wrong. What happens in sl stays in sl.”

Well, maybe so to the former, but I disagree with the latter. Sl is a very powerful tool for personal transformation. It’ll change you whether you want it to or not, whether you want to admit that it’s changing you or not, and whether or not you choose to be a conscious participant in the change.

First, let’s talk about the superficial stuff. We’re all beautiful in sl. I sure am. Everyone is. ( <digression:> Well, almost everyone. I’ve seen a few supergross avs, but those are exceptional. I’ve also got one friend who, contrary to usual sl practice, has an av that is quite overweight; this reflects her appearance in rl; she’s very happy in her skin, and wants to reflect that in her av-choice. I think that’s pretty cool. But it’s still exceptional. </digression:>)

But that kinda veracity isn’t me. In rl, I’m average height, pretty average build. I’m pretty fit, but I’m not a gym junkie, and I don’t look like it. But my av sorta does. And he’s tall. Really tall: usually over seven feet, although I sometimes diminish his height a bit when I’m dancing with one of my friends who is very short. Ridiculous, isn’t it? Oh, and I’m also fair-skinned, with kinda brownishreddishblondish hair, pretty ordinary. My av, though, has very striking silverwhite hair. And he’s black. And spotted. And has fur. And has a long swishy tail. Most of the time. ‘Cuz I’m a cat in sl. Most of the time. I gotz feline grace in sl, a quality that’s pretty much escaped me in rl.

So, what does this have to do with the subject of bringing sl out into your rl? Well, when you’re in sl, you’re always among beautiful people, you see. I found myself being changed by this. After I’d been in sl for a few weeks, I noticed that I was paying more attention to what I was eating, and I started to lose weight. I didn’t go on a diet, or develop a lightning eating disorder or anything like that. In sl, I’m always in the company of lean, fit peeps. My theory is that I became subconsciously aware of my weight because of being in the sl environment. I lost about 15 pounds, and it happened without any real effort, I think because I shifted my perception of myself away from my rl self to the one I am in sl. I let my unreal reality intrude on my real reality, and it literally changed my shape, without any unpleasant exertion on my part. Pretty cool, no?

Another, more subtle sl effect I’ve experienced is that I’ve become more socially aware and less inhibited with strangers. In sl, it’s pretty easy to strike up a conversation with someone you think is interesting. For me this is especially true if there’s something cool goin’ on in the other’s profile, like something very funny or something moving. But sometimes it’s cool just to say “Hi” without any of those kindsa inducements, and see what happens. It’s a bit of a crapshoot. Most of the time I have interactions that are just fine, and many times they’re awesome, and sometimes they suck. But in sl it’s so painless to just move on if there’s nothing there. Nothing bad happens. Nothing at all.

This experience has made me, again in a short time, much more open to people I don’t already know. It’s made me less obviously self-protective. Again, without any conscious effort. I don’t think, “Hmmm. That person over there looks fascinating. I’d like to walk over and start a conversation, but that’s kinda scary. Who knows what’ll happen. But wait: it’s always okay in sl. Okay. I’m gonna do it.” Not at all. Again, the shift has been without conscious effort. It just seems more natural than it ever did before, to be more open than I ever was before. Again, pretty cool.

Dancing. What about that? You know, I have exactly the same kind of ability to dance in sl that everyone else does. That means that in sl, I’m a freak. So, has my ability to dance in sl carried over into rl? Erm, no.

How about the not-so-cool stuff? There is that, too. And it can be pretty dark. Sometimes sl is a mirror that reveals to me things about myself that I wish were not true. Am I gonna make personal disclosures about what I’ve learned from blinking in front of the sl mirror?

Ehh. Not right now. Mebbe some other time.

This is totally cool.

So they fudged on their ages a bit, but some rules should definitely be broken by some people. Read about it.

I love love, which is why I love this:

My Friend: ARGYYYYYYYYY

My Friend: HOW ARE YOUUUUUUUU

Me: Hey!

Me: Great!

Me: You?!

Me: Married yet?

My Friend: noo not married..just partners

My Friend: LOl

My Friend: soo how are you i really missed you

Me: Well…

Me: Good. Very, very busy with my new job, which is very fun and also hard work.

My Friend: cool

Me: I have hardly been in sl at all.

Me: I can’t visit sl at work.

My Friend: I know you told me…

Me: Because I work for the government.

Me: Yeah.

Me: But, actually, I think that has been a good thing.

Me: I sure do miss everyone here, though.

My Friend: yeahhhh well they miss you too!!

Me: lol!

Me: So how are you?

My Friend: I am sooo great and soo happy

My Friend: last week I was the whole week with my SL partner in RL..MMMM

Me: That was in France?

My Friend: first time second time was in amsterdam and in my house

Me: This is serious!

My Friend: yess yesss I love him sooo much

This is my friend whom I call Traveller in this post. It almost goes without saying, but I am sooo happy for her.

One of the things that’s so cool about this story is that my friend is so open to everything in sl. She’s been burned before in the the metaverse with the metafire of metabetrayal, and she’s somehow remained her open, glorious self, unwearied by cynicism, seemingly expecting the best from everyone, happy and demonstrative.

As I’ve said before, I hope this guy’s awesome. He needs to be.

A friend asks this question. As it happens, I’ve been thinking about this one a good bit, too, kinda parked at the intersection of sl and rl. So this is a response, but it’s mo’ n’ dat, too. If you hate to wax philosophical, just quit reading now. You should prolly also quit if you love to wax philosophical but are put off by incoherence, because coherent I ain’t. At least not always…

“Perhaps love is the process of my gently leading you back to yourself.”
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

This is where my friend ends the post linked above. It’s really close to what I think love is.

I believe in love. I believe that it is the most powerful force in the universe, and I also believe that it’s terribly misunderstood.

Most of the time, when I hear my friends talk about love, I hear descriptions and discussions of the feelings engendered by love, of the emotional impact brought about by love, the good vibes or the anger, the jealousy, or the need to dominate, or the desire to be absorbed in what one thinks to be the totality of another human being. Love sings to us of pleasure, of rapture even, of transport outside ourselves, of connection with something sublime and mysterious, sweet and compelling, and we want to capture that song and make it ours, however it sings to us.

It’s only natural to try to apprehend feelings that resonate so strongly within us, that are so good, so strong, even when the feelings are overwhelming, or dark. Those feelings make us feel more alive than we feel in their absence, or in their weakening.

But I don’t believe the feelings brought on by love are the same things as love itself. Something we call “love” is a drug that delivers some kickass euphoria. I am among those who would chase that buzz all the way to the moon.

SecondLife is a huge aid to that chase, because we can be anything we wanna be there, and we can connect so easily with a much larger universe of people there than we can in rl. The cost of a blown relationship in sl is minimal. You’re never more than a coupla’ clicks away from ending one and moving on to the next. Sex, which is IMHO about the very best adjunct of love, is a commodity in sl. It’s so easy to have, without any of the apparent consequences of unbridled indulgence in rl.

SL can break down barriers between people, which makes it much easier to be lovers there. This happens because an av in sl is necessarily incomplete, and is almost always highly idealized. And because I can present myself there as a pure product of my imagination, I can make myself really easy to love.

But behind my av, and yours, is still a real person. The kind of person Saint-Exupery was talking about. If I love you well, the way he’s suggesting, I’m not gently leading your av back to itself; I’m gently leading you, even as you are doing the same for me. That’s a wild idea. It seems to suggest that love is more than buzz-chasin’. It suggests that love is something (a feeling? a chemical reaction? a spiritual motive? how the hell should I know?) that is interested in much more than the self, than in self-aggrandizement. It suggests mutual selflessness, a real interest in the well-being of the other. It suggests a desire, and an ability, to look deeply into the soul of another and call out the very best of what is there, in the heart of another human being, and it suggests the potential of great joy in the process of looking, and of calling. This is some of what Saint-Exupery’s def suggests to me.

But OTOH, it also suggests the potential for sorrow, for disappointment, for pain, even for boredom. That’s because it suggests that love is a conscious choice, one that is aided by all kinds of ineffable chemistries, and one that is a mystery, but that is a choice, a decision, nonetheless. If I love you, what will that mean for me? If I follow Saint-Exupery, it means that I will tolerate your weaknesses, your infuriating habits, your self-deception, and all the rest, because I can see at least some of the amazing wonder that you are, and I will delight with you in uncovering it. I’ll understand that the path there, however, is not a smooth and level one, but that because we’re both human, is hilly, and sometimes strewn with debris. I’ll have to decide if it’s worth it to me to go down that path with you, and you’ll have a similar decision to make. We’ll have a choice to make, to love, and one to reaffirm as we go.

Wow. Needs editing. And there’s much more to say, obviously. I mean, peeps been talkin’ bout dis shit forever, and we won’t have the last word. But I’m a believer. And I think this kind of love is possible in sl. I just don’t think it’s what most people there are looking for.

SL is more than a game. Sometimes it gets awfully close to the bone.

My best friend, she’s a poet. See?

You Broke Me

One word from you snapped something deep inside

Leaving me rattling

with the sound of

broken cogs;

Of coils and springs

Unraveling.

The clock of joy was stopped

at five past midnight.

No hand can wind back time

Or reassemble

These scattered pieces

Of my fractured heart.

For L.