a hump day haiku
mental storm in a teacup
nope, nothing wafts in

Is There Life in Second Life?

"My cartoon finds your cartoon attractive."

I'm exploring the consciously created, coded entity, the alternate universe known as Second Life, (or, alternatively, "SL" or "2L") to its denizens.

This is as opposed to "RL" or "1L" as I've seen them refer to real life...or, as I'm becoming prone to thinking of it as, "real" life.

SL isn't a metaphor for RL. It's a stripped down simulacrum. So, why is it I'm scared of emotional or moral freefall in SL...and yet I don't feel that way in RL, where things have very real consequences? DISCUSS:

Maybe the phenomenon of "crazies" and other lapses in self-control described by those who experience or suffer it here is the response of individuals to finding themselves in a place with few (and even fewer legal) boundaries? This vacuum is full-frontal stygian abyss, the gazing into which leads to madness ...or enlightenment.

While the truth and purity of liberty gives voice to exultation in some in SL, this world, by having a very explicable Creator, makes the existential angst when faced with absolute freedom and zero instrinsic meaning just too much for some souls to bear, causing them to miss out the wonderful opportunity to "scream the eternal "'Yes!'"

What Sl has Taught me about Real Life

What marvelous symmetry and yet how odd to reach enlightenment from the opposite direction: by sinking deeper into illusion.

Almost touched it

It was so brief, I nearly missed it entirely. Glance affectionately upon a dear image and a subtle sensation wafted through me. I became transfixed in its wake and it crystalised as certainty. Usually smooth and seamless, the overlapping plates of consciousness reconfigured at the very same time I looked up, exposing for a timeless moment a glimpse beyond.

"I am you. You are me."

So simple and uninflected, it came to me in exactly those words yet wasn't volitional. It flew straight to the heart of a ping I've had many times before; harking back to the original waking dream about the One I can't seem to recall I am.

Thoughts yet again about this term, "me". We all use it to refer to our conventional selves in the singular, but nobody seems at all perturbed about the unlikelihood of us all being "I" and "me," and yet still the parallel, isolated individuals we feel most comfortably terrified in supposing we are.

It was so close I nearly touched it. I couldn't stop myself mentally clutching at it, though, so it naturally dissolved. But not before warming me with its trailing edge of love and beauty; the simple, elegant truth of One, another clue lying naked before me, like the dream revealed to me once and which continues to tap at the window to this consciousness, even years later.

At this moment I feel the veil, microns thin, separating the me riding this fleshy sack, tapping away on this notebook, from the me, industriously playing with her new mobile phone across the bed and clinically skeptical about both my lightbulb sensations and the possibility of bumping uglies with the edge of the universe.

While I do wish to journal it, I choose not to force it...so to bed.

Grieving the Loss of My Daughter

My beautiful little girl, who woke up with a smile and a laugh and brightened every room with her presence and always saw the good in others...she's really gone.

And in her place is this...this...woman!

more recently...

Why is 'spontaneous' about as premeditated as a word can get...?

Republic of Westralia

Just as I suspected as a university student, way back when, it really IS all about the money.

Money for massive corporate (multinational oil/national retail) concerns; money for the laughable entity that is Australia's federal government; money for the bootlicking, seat-sniffing, mysogenistic yokels whose #1 priority is the dizzying sale of our state's birthright for a veritable mess of foreign pottage and bragging rights to a disgusting stat surplus.

Not one public figure or institution has got the slightest clue about what is in our nation's and our citizens' best interests. The focus is rather on employment figures, oil prices (my god! why DON'T all Australians drive natural gas-powered cars...?!?!)

We wring our hands about inflation...that is itself being fuelled by the massive demand for labour that oil, gas, mining corporations can't get into tankers and pipelines quick enough.

...not that anyone would read about it in "our" state's paper, the West Australian. Letter after letter to the editor never sees the light of day if questioning what federation has ever done for our state - or, god forbid, one should mention the word "secession".

I'm drunk. I'm disgusted and I'm tired...from working long hours and trying to keep a small business afloat in a state that doesn't give a toss about me and the many others like me, likewise struggling to remain afloat and sane.

Must sleep, but am glad to have squeezed out the time for even this incoherent post that nobody will read....Nevermind...it's a tonic for the writer.

We need a state government that believes in the same things as we do...not mere shills for corporate and federal interests.

If our government were real, they'd be threatening secession for the shafting we get from Canberra.

If we were real Westralians, we'd be disgusted by the level of representation we get here in WA. We are being taxed without representation.

It should be illegal.