blog.grahamallen.net

i am merely an avatar on the internet. a ghost in the machine. my song is sung in binary. my voice is merely an electronic reproduction from sometime seconds, minutes or even days before. the face you see is not really my own.

i don’t even know if i’m at all organic anymore. do i feel myself breathing? do i feel alive? not sure. it’s all lost in a haze of pixels and sounds. am i being critical of a world that i enjoy? hard to say. i’m not sure that i even know the answer to that question. it almost seems a recurrent theme here. i am questioning my own existence while trying to identify what that existence means. it’s almost a dichotomy.

i wonder what it would be like…..walk the streets of new york or los angeles….and instead of bricks, mortar, flesh and steel…..a collage of pixelated graphics creating the entire landscape of the world. would it be any less real than the world i live in now? it would almost be more genuinely false. or should i say it would be more genuinely {null variable}? again, not sure. this almost reeks of kantian bs, but i can’t stop myself.

i could make up any name for myself. be anything i want to be. say anything i want to say. and find an audience, no matter how small. but what gets lost in human interaction? when we create an alternate reality in a place that can’t be defined, have we lost something? even the music that makes me move. it used to be an analog reproduction. now it’s binary. small streaming bits of 1 and 0, interpreted by a machine, remodulated into an audio signal. do you know how much i love the music? do we remember when music was created with breath, with voice, with wind, with a strum across a string? do we remember when our greatest musicians were talented? when our greatest musicians actually wrote the songs and believed in the words they were singing?

yeah. i’m criticizing a world i love. i’m criticizing a world i’ve helped to create in my own small way.

i could carry on dialog with women from around the world. i don’t, but i could. but i couldn’t touch them. couldn’t smell them. wouldn’t know what it’s like to be there next to them.

i can make myself a dangerous pirate from the seediest island in the carribean. who would know better? i’m almost certain i could find images to support this reality. or i could be a botanist from canadia or norwegia. i could be a porn star or a church-going, god-loving christian family man. would you know any different?

yeah. i’m criticizing technology. call it a strange mood. a weird place. i’m sick today. that could have something to do with it. it could also be that i miss a world that went away some time ago and, maybe, i’m just trying to re-invent myself within the current world. or maybe i’m simply having a nostalgic moment. i do have a tendency to be nostalgic. i think it accompanies loyalty.

these are simply thoughts i felt the need to share in that digital world i’m being so critical of.

I love this word. Seriously. It gets thrown about so much in our current culture, it warrants its own discussion.

I’ve come to a point in my life where I hear this word and it throws up a huge caution sign. The minute I hear someone mutter “I hate drama” I can almost sense that there’s drama coming. Granted, this isn’t always true, but it seems that MOST of the time, the people who claim to hate drama are the ones perpetuating drama. Of course, this leads us to ponder another point: how does one define drama?

To me it seems like drama has come to mean anything that causes one social discomfort. Well, shit…..welcome to life. Has it been a fun journey? This is what people do. We are constantly in conflict with one another. For purposes of power, control and our general sense of ourselves, no two people will ever be perfectly in sync. Hence…..drama. Certainly, there’s a level of maturity implied when discussing drama- the implication being that those who are “dramatic” are less mature than those who aren’t. But how do we account for situations that have a general appearance that does not align with reality?

This is where we get into trouble. Everyone will have an opinion….yes, the whole “opinions are like assholes” routine….and almost everyone will align their own perception of a given situation with the prevailing opinion that they hold. In many instances, any controversy or disagreement that occurs over this given perspective will, no doubt, be considered drama. And to provide comfort to ourselves, we will simply say “I don’t need your drama”. But how often is this perceived drama really a result of the opinion that is held? How many of us are truly open to what is going on around us? How many of us are truly aware that deep below the surface of ourselves, we are generally the same dirty specimen of human life that everyone else is?

I don’t think it’s drama that we need to be concerned about. I don’t think it’s the general conflict that we encounter with others that we need to be concerned about. What we lack, and what truly undermines any efforts we make to avoid this drama, is humility. More social commentary on the fact that we, as Americans living in this current culture during this current social climate, are spoiled children with no sense of individual responsibility and no sense of our own humanity.

There’s no such thing as drama. It is a myth that has been defined by the culture of MySpace, Facebook, LiveJournal, et al. Sadly, I, myself, have embraced this culture and taken my own place within its seedy grasp. So perhaps, I am drama personified. Or perhaps I’m merely fascinated by the new perspective on social interaction such technology and instant access to the social climate such tools provide.

Whatever the case, I don’t believe in drama as any tangible reality. Merely a creation of human beings to make being right that much easier.

I’m awakened by a coughing fit at 6:30 am….can’t go back to sleep, so i head for the fridge and pour myself another glass of oj…….step outside to further reduce my lungs’ ability to provide oxygen to my blood and its a strange morning…….the air is slightly chilled…..the sky is completely gray and there is a mist of fog permeating the trees…….i look to my right and there’s a bird i can’t identify…..at first i want to say it’s an owl, but a closer glance i see that it is not, but it is DEFINITELY in the hawk family……stark pointy-tipped beak and an odd noise this thing makes…..i look to my left and the blossoms on the neighbors tree have this strange pink cast to them……back to my right and the bird has disappeared…..i look across the street at the neighbors house and the bird has flown to the patio, picked something up and flown back to its perch on the streetlight…..it has used what i can only guess is keen eyesight to capture a lizard and it devours it quickly….this is an amazing thing to wake up to…..like living in the discovery channel or something…..but one has to marvel at the eyesight this bird must have had, because this lizard was a good 150 feet from the bird’s perch…..this thing didn’t break stride…..flew straight to the lizard and straight back to the streetlight without hesitation…..i took pictures…..i’ll post them later……..