I think they call this low grade depression. It is not fatal, it will resolve itself eventually, I suppose.

I do not sleep very well at night, so I end up sleeping through most of my days. Watch TV. Out of the hundreds of channels available to me, I have the thing tuned to a crime fiction channel and so I end up watching endless re-runs of Cold Case and Silent Witness. Read a lot of crime fiction too. All of these loner detective types with destroyed personal lives. I think that is precisely why the likes of me so totally revel in this pulp…

I am on a sabbatical leave, supposedly writing up my PhD dissertation. Traveling for research related to that – ostensibly… I have conference papers to write, meetings to go to. Things to see, people to do – that would be me. Like, just now someone called me up to invite me to an art opening this evening. Will I go? Of course not. Some handy excuse will come along I am sure.

Sometimes I go and buy clothes though. Stuff I have no need for, that I have no inclination to wear even. Where to anyway, given that I do not even want to go out?

…

Second Life seems to have become a place of employment these days. I log in to get material for the npirl blog. Or sometimes I log in to clean out my inventory. All these clothes… RL… SL… All dressed up and nowhere to go – that would be me. There is a bit left on the Eastern shore under the water at Syncretia that I could conceivably build, but then I seem to have a real horror of doing so: Once that is done then I am done there. I will have no more prims left. And the place has to stay as it is till the end of January because of this exhibit anyway. Can’t really touch it.

…

So, into this emotional wasteland Truthseeker rezzed the Singularapture this week. While we were busy there today Jedda Zenovka, who was with us, gave me a glorious photo of the view from her RL veranda: A rain forest.

The Singularapture looks so unbelievably beautiful where it is now at Syncretia. And in my inventory I have a snapshot of a rain forest from the other side of the globe.

And then this text floated over my head in Second Life the other day:

“This time I am alone.
This time I will not leave.”

Just about sums it up, doesn’t it?

…

http://syncretia.wordpress.com/

I have been toiling away at this for the past week or so: The island is going to be in a show at the Slought Foundation, curated by Osvaldo Romberg, in Philadelphia, starting from December the 10th. So, I was asked to prepare something in the nature of a lonely planet guide for the place. It is feared that some of the visitors, who will be greeted and shown around by Xia (grrrr…, but then I suppose, I have better things to do in this life, right?), may get lost…

The pages are more or less finished, but I have decided to start adding posts about building issues as well. These will come in the fullness of time, as and when something occurs to me – so stay tuned for further developments.
;-)

Dedicated to the anonymous reader of this blog…

… There is a woman playing the piano. You probably cannot hear the notes but you see her from far away. She is playing Claire de Lune. It takes a long time for the notes to emerge, she has to start over and over, from the very beginning. Little did she know it at the time, but it turned out that she was giving a recital to an audience of only one. I suppose she did have an inkling of sorts… That sense of knowing when someone else is there… Over a distance of hundreds upon hundreds of miles.

She was born as a man. Made her appearance clad in those unsightly black shirt and jeans, hair combed sideways, staggering onto Orientation Island. That was one year ago. She/he did not need to hang around there, after all, his/her human knew her way around Second Life. She teleported to the mainland, stood lost at an info hub. And then he/she was discarded. Until quite recently.

She is an odd one, this woman who was born as a man. It is taking her quite some time to find herself, to figure out who she is. She rarely talks, she has no friends to talk to anyway. Belongs only to one group and that one out of sheer necessity.

I, on the other hand, am Alpha. I have friends. I belong to groups. I even have a real virtual job for God’s sakes, writing for one of the most prestigious blogs of Second Life. And then of course there is my life’s work, my building. I am Alpha Auer, Resident of Second Life. Not a mere cipher. I have an identity.

But do I really? If all of this is so cast in stone, so indisputably real, then who is she? Why is she around even? Why is she the one giving nocturnal recitals? Why is she haunting my human imagination? Filling my dreams with her unreality?

…

I was at a lecture on Second Life last week. One thing that was said stuck with me. That Real Life is no more “real” than Second Life. It is all a projection anyway. Plato’s Cave. Second Life gives us a novel understanding of our imprisoned condition, facing the shadows of our so-called “reality”. Our minds.

We do not belong. Neither here nor there. Meanwhile, she will continue to play the piano. Sometimes.

…

When I was a child I had a wolf. We lived on the outskirts of the city, and somehow this feral puppy made it into our garden. For months and months all I could do was to leave food for her, knowing that she would eventually venture forth in the cover of darkness. In time she approached me. She never became fully domesticated but she was there, on the periphery. There was even love in her beautiful yellow eyes, or so at least I thought.

And that is ultimately how we do belong. In the affection we perceive in alien yellow eyes. For a time.

…