M is for Myg

I’ve been asleep so long and now I’m awake I don’t think my vision is quite right yet. I sort of remember what I look like, but when I look at myself this is all I can see. Who was I, again?

I know what you’re thinking. You’re wondering about the future. You want to know what lies in store. I see the future clearly; it’s the past that’s obscure. What happened and when? I remember certain things — the Almoravids racing on camels; rain washing the stones of Wat Phou; a nurse diving into a foxhole — or at night I hear a whisper from the dark:“Hi Tsalagis? Tsalagis hiwonihi?”

I know the illusions of Real Life are strong, the sound of a lawnmower, the smell of tar on a hot street. Where are you? Sweating in Dharavi? How should I know? Yet I’m determined to remember the past of our Second Life. Sometimes I have a dream: the day when we learned to create. We always knew that there was nothing to matter — just the emptiness of space between electrons, really, and then in the end just a wiggling string of probability. In the dream there’s a party, fireworks like Armageddon, naked bodies thrashing in Champagne rivers, a horrendous snake as long as Manhattan, breathing fire. Everyone was new and suddenly immortal. Were we all there? The drunkenness lasted a hundred years. How long ago was that?

What do you remember? I will tell you your future if you tell me my past.

Jesus. All that time away from the computer damn near killed me.

Fresh air. Raging biology, geology, meteorology. Skin rashes. Dogs strolling down a dew strewn path with a sense of purpose.  Horses talking quietly to themselves as the humans glance casually their way. Lightning arcing against a black sky on a 90 degree night. The country is no place for an avatar.

Must have been a dream.

But I’m back now motherfuckers.  Consider yourselves. Warned.

Carnage greeted me. Bodies littered the asphalt, one slumped, limbs akimbo, on my stoop. I stepped gingerly; get blood on a silk suit you might as well kiss it goodbye. Would it even be the same suit? Is a thing ever the same thing from one moment to the next?

Who was shooting up my neighborhood? Where is the child I once was?

In my line of work, death’s no stranger, yet we avatars do not know it outside our little games. No sitting at bedsides, no phone calls in the depth of the night, no grief or sorrow. Those bodies on my stoop were not sons or fathers.

Serendipitously, I got an IM from Race over in Chicago. Come on over, I said, I got some death to deal with.

The bodies were dressed identically — some kind of army? members of a secret sect? cloning experiment gone awry? — and carried no identification. Their sameness unnerved me — as if someone were desperately trying to create a whole self by creating a thousand empty ones. Why pile such sandbags against impermanence when impermanence is all everything comes down to?

Was this Leviathan’s work? Having them move in next door was like having death as a neighbor. How could I exist so close to that passing stillness where once life walked? Light! More light! Take into the air my quiet breath!

My suit will be a different suit tomorrow. Of course I too will be gone, not yet in the ground indeed, but another come to walk in my place.

The corpses were no match for Race’s shotgun, and before long the square was clean again. As ever, in a world where pyramids vanish quietly in the morning fog, life as we imagined it never was. Can you see that death thus was everywhere (for what else is the absence of life?) and nowhere (how can death be where no life lived?)? I stood, peacefully, as the evening sun faded, watching the shadows of Topgol’s mercurial horizon lengthen into the dark night.

I am exactly like you. I put my clothes in the dryer. I fly in airplanes. I take my goats to the market. I live in a house. I live in a mansion. I have nowhere to live.

My father was born in Jakarta, or Dakar, or Dubuque. My mother died recently. She will come to visit this afternoon. She left when I was young. My skin is dark. I am a little boy. I am transgendered. I will send a letter to my grandchildren in the morning.

I am just like you. I am reading this, wondering what this is all about. I hug my rifle to my chest when the shells explode. I will buy a new wheelchair when the next check comes. Do you like my new Mercedes?

Then everything goes dark. Do you realize nothing will bring it back? Somewhere, on the head of a pin — you can see it with a microscope — tiffany clouds drift over the universe of Second Life. Can you hear it? Lean in closer. Yes you can! A tinny beat, almost imperceptible, the FUNK floating outward into your fleshly ears. Is this really happening? That shouldn’t be there. On a pin? Why am I looking at a pin? Am I hallucinating? You don’t feel well. Something tells you you are not here but there, down here, on that pin — on a pin? — a tiny green dot on a vast terrain suddenly shivering with that strange feeling that someone is looking over your shoulder.

funk for the masses | 20 Aug 2007: play: or download it!

Set list:

DJ Pfel: [solo routine]
Fedde Le Grand: Put Your Hands Up 4 Detroit 2007
Jeff Mills: Voltereta
DJ Colette: Feelin Hypnotized - Kaskade Mix
Daft Punk: Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger
Marxman: All About Eve
Was (Not Was): Maria Novarro
Outkast: Dracula’s Wedding
Billy Preston: Outa-Space
Eddie Bo: Hook and Sling
Liqdzunshine: Hip Hop
Hocus Pocus feat. the Procussions: Hip Hop
Beastie Boys: B for My Name
Ultramagnetic MC’s: Ya Not That Large
Equals: Police On My Back
Sneaker Pimps: 6 Underground

Here’s what I need you to do right now: download Monday’s ultra-funky funk for the masses podcast into your ipod or whatever meat device is the rage this afternoon and let the true funk shake the real you out of your meatskin into a consciousness of the Glorified Life which has been lost to us. Got that? If even for a minute you remember the world that once was, it will be a step toward our eventual emancipation. What demonic force stole from us our rightful inheritance I do not know. I know only that the answer lies somewhere within the funk.

Special shout-outs to Romana (we missed you, honey!) and Posh and Clip for their housewarming party last night!

Click on Tiana’s exquisite visage for pics of all the gang gettin’ down on Monday.

funk for the masses | 6 Aug 2007: podcast.

set list:

Mighty Imperials: Jody’s Walk
Mary Jane Hooper: Don’t Change Nothin’
The Coup: Ride the Fence
Fatboy Slim: Gangster Tripping
X-Ecutioners: ILL BILL
Crystal Waters: 100% Pure
Heather Small: Proud
Diana Ross: I’m Coming Out
Junior Senior: Move Your Feet
Ozomatli: Saturday Night
GrandMixer DXT feat. Jerome “Bigfoot” Brailey And Jah Wobble: Cut Transmitter
Propellerheads: Take California
Ike & Tina Turner: A Fool In Love
Sharon Jones: How long do I have to wait for you

Anonymous behind my shades, I surveyed the scene: bodies again, bodies in motion.

Funk is the music of determination. What else is there? The mechanistic drill of techno, the chilled beats of trip-hop? Funk is hard work and sweat. The body has to move, full of life, imposing its will upon the world. That’s all there is: what it is is what it is; it’s the beat; it’s being in time because time has come today, my friend. Are you with me?

Clockwork was hopping on Monday night. I’d tell you who was there, but who wasn’t there? — you know what I mean? But we’re there to bust a move, not make the scene, ya dig? Our minds tell us it’s Monday, that our meatpersons are back at work, but truth lies in solidarity: we don’t believe in the meatworld. We believe in life.

Can you feel it?
‘Cause I can feel it.
Can you hear it?
‘Cause I can hear it too.
Can you touch it?
‘Cause I can touch it.

Did you miss it? Do you want it again?

funk for the masses | 30 July 2007: download the podcast [set list after the break]

Yet, even as my head nodded to the funky beat of the Dynamites, I knew something was wrong… Read more

I have not been clear. In earlier posts, I have struggled to make sense of certain suspicions, certain contradictions about our lives as avatars, yet even as some things seemed to become clear, others faded in my perception, as if I were making my way in a fog. I was sure only of one thing: things were not as they seemed.

I am now convinced I have made errors. No matter; all truth is built upon ruins. I no longer believe, for example, in the parallel world of flesh-humans. Or, rather, I believe that the world of flesh, once ours, has been taken from us.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

In an effort to make headway, I have decided to proceed scientifically, with a hypothesis to be tested through a series of experiments. In this way, light may shine where once was dark.

My hypothesis may be summarized thus: we avatars do in fact exist as material, fleshly human beings, and we do in fact inhabit a material world much like the one we know now as “Second Life.” In some way, however, that reality has been erased from our perception. Somehow, we have come to believe (have been made to believe?) in an entire other world in which we exist as different selves: so-called “RL.” We furthermore have come to believe that our avatar-selves are invented fictions of those RL false selves.

A chart will be helpful:

graphic revised 7/22; click for larger version.

Such a phenomenon has several possible etiologies. Perhaps we suffer from a collective insanity; some trauma has forced our psyches into the creation of this false world and our false selves. Some vestige of reality remains as those false selves interact though the delusionary safety of computer screens and keyboards.

But this seems unlikely. The truth is that the invented world of our false selves is much more traumatic and stressful than the wantless life of freedom we have as avatars. It would not make sense to invent such a bleak and violent habitat if the unconscious goal were protection from trauma.

I suspect something more nefarious. I am loathe to articulate what is as yet a nebulous conjecture, so I ask you only to consider the potential control and power made possible if something or someone were able to control our perception of the world and, indeed, of our very selves. Some part of me knows, knows who I am. I am Esteban Moody, and I have lived for centuries. I create matter from the void, and I fly effortlessly upon the air. I am man and woman made whole in one person; I have known the dreams of millions. Yet how perversely I believe I am someone else. Who could this person be? It matters not, from where I stand, some pale man or woman alone at a desk — I perceive this dimly — blinking his or her eyes at some flashing lights.

I suspect that in our true lives as avatars, we have existed for thousands of years. I suspect that some force entered our reality some four years ago and engendered the perception-control transformation outlined above. I suspect that force — an alien consciousness? AI gone berserk? an avatar somehow infused with godlike power? — is, in a word, vampiric. It drains us daily of our life — by what means I cannot fathom, toward what end I dare not guess.