Second Life

While you are at the bar, we can’t help saying we’ve never felt more allegorical, and as a result we are pretty sure that the privilege of blogging about the experience we were just busy having of our avatars is emphatically not what is meant by becoming the subject of history. Nonetheless and still: finding our meaty self (now that the jokes about the plural have really gotten good/paid off) trapped in the real time of a geographical space not only not that virtual region where we were all just sorta hanging out together, but also not that real space where y’all are now, so far as we are equipped to tell; prevented as we are from joining us in the bar by such banal limits as the zip code in which some of us choose to reside and rent our little corners of real estate, courtesy of time leached from our skin by those machines like us we call students in yet another zip code for reasons not unrelated to the state budget presently residing in an account owned by Wells Fargo in transit to our landlord, who at the moment is hacking away the greenery encroaching the sidewalk leading up to the house; just after having gotten to bear witness to all of our avatars growing locked into place by our efforts simultaneously to exercise the virtual right to fly individually proved too many choices for the system to handle, whereupon not merely the failure to coordinate collective action seemingly made possible by the latest constellation of ones and zeroes was dramatized (bearing in mind T’s remarks on such technological glitches and failures in relation to histories we tell thereof and don’t) but so too was the nearly instantaneous breakdown in conversation accompanying that failure, which might otherwise have permitted those efforts to be coordinated; all while feeling never-before-having-been made to feel more the schizophrenic subject we are actually required to happen to turn out to be, sitting in our little if quite lovely rented room of real-time overlooking the neighbors’ roses as we were and are at the desk surrounded by dog-eared papers and flagged books we are currently in need of having condensed yesterday into the talk we are meant to give a little over a week from today before the authors of said books and papers, all sandwiched with us here amidst the multiple and multiplying duties of being an instructor of record at the end of term while all this is going on, somewhere or other, we can’t help asking, for whom? It does not appear to us to be for us, this little moment of in itself we get to be savage and savaged narrators of…

~ by Tim on June 3, 2008.