Café John Fantasy

The weather was clear today and I'm waiting for the full moon to rise over the wooded suburban hills across the way. Today was the sort of day for buying potting soil, weeding, pruning stray rose and rosemary canes, and sprucing up the walkways and retaining walls. It also was a day for minor electrical maintenance on the house.

On days like this my thoughts turn to Café John. This morning I took a rag and some cleaner and scrubbed and polished the glass top of the plastic wicker table. (Later Mark put some torn-out electrical wires on top, so I had to clean it again.) Then I swept off the cracked concrete patio and wished it was a little bit dryer out, so that I could bring out the indoor-outdoor carpet and not have moss grow on it.

My fantasy is to go out some morning when it's not too cold and write, pausing only to sip tea or partake of a small morsel, while soft music plays in the background. In a perfect little world, someone would bring me savories on a clever little arrangement of plates. But I have to prepare it myself. The bees buzz in rosemary and lavender, and the roses add their scent to the breeze. And then the useless creature hobbles over and meows for attention.

I used to have a gazing globe, green and perfect; but it exists only in memory.

I write, away from power cords and the internet.

And then the tea is cold, or the Neighbors with Loud Trucks return, or the battery icon on the laptop displays one less bar and anyway it's time to run some other errands. I find myself, garbed in polar fleece and jeans, and not in a velvet bedroom jacket and white silk cravat. I gather the empty plates and retreat to the kitchen, where the other dishes are waiting. My writing is done.

But for a moment I was somewhere else, somewhere elegant, where writers are sustained and supported by a garden of sensual herbs, the promise of clean crisp linens, and hot porcelain.

John Is Writing!

John is Writing! Let's help him! Roll the dice for the number of pages he's produced! Uh oh! There are obstacles along the way...

• Caffeine! Come to me, sweet ambrosia of inspiration and fill me with the frisson of creativity. Let the fountain of words flow from -- oh damn! Mark drank the last can! Before you head out to the store, your dentist is on the phone....


• Dion Fortune Because every story, especially if it's a fantasy with magic, needs the slightly goofy but completely thorough magical theories of a quaintly racist 1930's English Mystic.


• The Twin Towers of Tolkien Sclerosis and Not Enough Details (because it's so clear in The Author's head it doesn't need to be on paper). See the teeny-tiny crack between the two towers? The Author (and the manuscript) need to fit through.


• The Dictionary of Obscure Usage, chock full of words like mantis (not the bug), dolmen (not quite what Stonehenge is), transmigration (not when geese fly to the sex-change clinic every spring), sortes (dicing with fate), triptych, pistols, and meniscus. Doesn't everyone read this book before they go to bed -- I mean, meniscus is in The Joy of Cooking...?


• Mystical! Magical! Science! Or was that Scientific, Magical Mysticism? In any case, the characters are working in a world where even rubber bands have Deep Mystical Meaning. Very likely that eclipse is a Message From Deity, even if the characters are measuring discrepancies in Mercury's orbit during it. C'mon, what did you expect from a guy with his own portable Aubrey Holes? Roll die: 1-3 Go back to Dion Fortune.


• An Alien? At least we think it's an alien. It might be a human in a latex suit. Or it might be a houseplant. There's also a possibility the alien is really The Author. Lose a turn for inscrutability.


• Egypt! Or at least A Pyramid! Because ancient Egyptian things rock. Especially hieroglyphs (from Greek words meaning "sacred" (from hiero) and "carvings" (from glyph)). Go on, you know you want to put a necklace on and say "Almighty Isis (Isis, Isis, Isis...)." In a pinch, replace the Pyramid with a Really Big Spaceship. Oh wait... that's been done, hasn't it? Lose a turn trying to turn a towel into the headdress the Sphinx wears.


• The Lost Chord Blame Sir Arthur Sullivan for this one. The Author won't go quite so far as to have his characters discover The Lost Chord that Opens the Spaceship, but they will have a Mystical, Magical, Science Moment while playing their rubber band guitars and singing. Almost obligatory. Roll die: 1-3 a Certain Sound Engineer throws a mixing board at you - lose a turn. 4-5 You duck and the board sails over you. 6 - Go to Mystical! Magical! Science!


• Tea It's Time for Tea! Really. It will help. Roll die: 1 - What The Author really needs is a Pepsi, go to Caffeine! 2-4 Ahh! Steaming Ceylon Goodness! 5-6 Lose a turn reminiscing about the now gone tea salon -- where writing, scones, ennui and that certain je ne sais quoi fleet through the air like a forgotten chanteuse's melody...


• Silly Hippies Or maybe aliens? They are The Author's equivalent of horny teens from a summer slasher movie. Lose a turn laughing at their antics.


• Wikipedia Because it's absolutely essential that the sexual exploits between wasps and orchids be lovingly and accurately detailed as a metaphor in the story. Roll die: 1-2 Lose a turn; 3-4 Go back to The Twin Towers. 5-6 Go back to Dictionary of Obsure Usage.


• Gathering the Lost The weary protagonist (or perhaps the protagonist's weary Dreamer love interest) must be sung home. Go back to The Lost Chord.


• Chocolate. There's nothing that can't be solved with just a teeny-tiny, itsy-bitsy, little chunk of chocolate. Followed by another. Now where was that stash again? Roll die 1-2 Found it! Chocolate is anti-oxidant, you know. 3-4 There's none to be had in the house for love or money. Go to Gathering the Lost. 5-6 Go to the store for more; lose turn.


• Second Life Research! The Author really needs to understand the mechanics of addition while exploring the metaphysical and spiritual aspects of his six foot four, muscle-bound, 30-something avatar. Because the virtual can be spiritual! Lose a turn.

...Okay, back to the game...

Soapbox: Prosperity Checks

Lately I've been thinking about Prosperity Checks. They really bug me because they strike me not only as superstitious twaddle, but as greedy, superstitious twaddle. I get angry and sad when I hear about Neo-Pagans espousing them.

For those of you who don't know what a Prosperity Check is, the idea is that within 24 hours of a new moon, you take a blank check, write down a dollar amount, write yourself as the recipient, and endorse the check with either "The Law of Abundance" or "The Universe." You can write down on the memo line what you're receiving the money for, if you want. Then you're supposed to forget about the check and let the universe do the rest.

And this is supposed to be a spiritual practice. I'm not sure if this is because spirituality is about coaxing cash prizes from the Divine or if legal tender is how Deity shows heavenly favor.

The web sites that talk about this sometimes cite Jim Carrey as writing a 20 million check to himself and getting paid that sum for The Cable Guy. Gee, let's see, a single alleged instance of this working for an actor who'd already made millions in previous movies. Yeah, that's proof this works.

Now, I'm not going to say that making a list of priorities isn't a bad thing; and there's something to be said for being clear in your mind what you want -- but having clear priorities is only the first step. As Starhawk once said, "In order to heal the world, we have to know what we value, we have to know what actions to take, and we have to know what structures to create."

For a while, I thought I might write a Prosperity Check and on the dollar amount line write in "Snake Oil Mongers Revealed as the Frauds They Are," signed, "The Law of Just Rewards." And I'd visualize angry mobs with torches. But then I thought, Hey! Let's try another Scientific Experiment With a Data Point of One!

So, next new moon, I'll write a check to myself for $1000 and on the memo line "From selling short stories." Because, after all, elegant words telling a cool story about an interesting character isn't enough to convince periodical editors to buy my work. I need the new moon and a funny check to help me.

And if I receive the usual 99% rejection slips between March 15 and April 14, then it's that stupid Prosperity Check's fault.

Writing and Updates

Mark had a good time skiing this weekend. I stayed home and wrote. I've been writing (which is good because for most of December and January I couldn't seem to get up enough oomph to do so). I'm usually a "seat-of-the-pants" writer. Outlines are frustrating to me -- so this time I'm trying an outline. It's mostly fun, although I often get a feel for my characters by sotp writing. What the outline is good for is showing me the weak parts in the story.

I also went back and took a look at some of my non-fiction. I think what I have is a manuscript on Neo-Pagan Theology that started out as a book and ended up as a pamphlet. Okay - it probably started out as self-therapy. It was written in a sustained moment of peke, and, unfortunately, the bitter humor is more bitter than humorous. There are some good bits in there, and I have to decide if what I want to say is worth the time to clean it up for a paper-publication, or if I should winnow out blog-sized excerpts and time-release it to the blog.

On other fronts...

Second Life ... is fun. I'm trying to limit my time there. Current project is scripting markers for Aubrey Holes -- my script has a bug, changing the value of llSleep is somehow changing how the script calculates a position. It's weird, even changing the sleep value from 10 to 10.0 seems to make a difference (so I'm suspecting some kind of floating point overflow error).

On the shoulder front: I can now shampoo my head with my left hand, which is an improvement. Still have to stretch all the time, though.

Writer's Block

Lately it's been hard to write. Rather than blog about not writing, I guess I'll actually write a short story or something.

Philosophy of Art

Scene: Saturday Morning. John is under the weather with a stomach bug and is soaking in the bath tub.


Mark (surveying the living room): "All of our food containers are filled with craft supplies."

John (lathering his hair): "Because Art is the Food of the Spirit!"

(pause)

Mark: "No, Cleanliness is the Food of the Spirit, (pause) and my Spirit is Oppressed."

Starlett and Moose

... we join the dream in progress, as the dreamer has been waking up every three minutes for the last hour...

It's the Muppet Show! With our very special guest star... I don't know who -- maybe Brooke Shields? She was tall, she had straight dark brown hair falling to her mid-back, and she wore a very revealing, red, push-up dress. (Pause to figure out where the phrase "You can show the fruit, but not the stems" fits into this dream and deciding that it's an earlier fragment ...) She obviously has breast implants.

Scene: The guest star dressing room. There's a desk in the center, with a kind of wicker bamboo couch next to the door. Because this is The Muppet Show, the wicker couch is also a lion (the bamboo canes move to make the lion's head). The guest star is talking with another Muppet -- this is a dream amalgam Muppet, probably voiced by Frank Oz. He's also tall and slender (kind of like Beaker, kind of like Gonzo), furry (like Ralph) and is a Moose.

Moose has come to Starlett's room to say "Hi," and to deal with the lion couch, which doesn't like being sat upon and keeps trying to eat Starlett's purse (I think). Moose and Starlett are former lovers, so there's that awkwardness.

Starlett: "Hi." (The camera angle is set from behind, below, and a little to her left; in other words, in such a way that the red scrap of cloth covering her torso looks like it's slipped in a Wardrobe Malfunction kind of way.)

Moose: "Hi. Um, I've come to fix the couch."

Starlett: "Oh. You've changed; it looks good."

Moose (staring straight at her breasts): "Uh, you, too."

The scene ends with Moose tripping over something and getting stuck in the lion couch.

(Break)

It's a Muppet Show Music Video scene. Starlett and Moose are walking along the beach, leaning into each other in front of the sun. Scene of them floating in the reeds of an estuary and sunning on the banks. Mandatory Muppet "Lovers Running Towards Each Other From a Distance" scene, which is followed by, "Bandaged Up Lovers Riding a Side-by-side Bike Through the Cobblestone Streets of Some Quaint European Village" scene (I think there were also canes involved...). All the while some 1960's style big-band with saxophones, trumpets and a banjo is playing while Starlett whisper-sings a love song from a Ranklin-Bass Christmas special.

(and then I woke up for the twentieth time this morning and just got up...)

Back to Submissions...

Alright. Sent out six manuscripts today. I have to remind myself when I receive many rejections (especially within 48 hours of each other) that A) I send manuscripts out in batches, so it's reasonable to expect rejections on batches and B) I sent twelve stories to WOTF before placing.

And, having re-read some of my manuscripts, I'm pleased with my own cleverness.

Ice or Steam ?

The other day I was working on virtual Neo-Pagan ritual altars in Second Life. I was scripting some call-and-responses and the next thing I knew, I had created a recursive "Blessed Be!" (the Neo-Pagan equivalent of "Amen!") One virtual altar would say "Blessed Be!" and another would hear it and repeat it. Since there were four altars at the time, my workspace was suddenly filled with an echoing chat-chorus of "Blessed Be!"

The situation reminded me of what I used to think the Christian Heaven was like: filled with all the angels singing "Hallelujah" all the time. Except this was Second Life. With chatting Neo-Pagan altars. I went into the scripting area and halted the scripts one by one, silencing the echoing blessing. Sometimes I wonder how angels might be God's programs. Sometimes I wonder what William Blake would think of the process of silencing virtual altars.

☃

There's something about the months of January and February that makes me think about religion. I'm blaming the lack of sunlight messing with my brain chemistry. Or possibly it takes me longer to recover from December distractions than it does ones in June. In any case, this time around, religion and Second Life have been cutting into my writing.

Okay, true confession time -- It seemed like the last few stories, I'd been writing and re-writing the beginning in a futile attempt to drive to the plot, and I'd gotten kind of tired of the morass. I was thinking, "It's a possibility I'm not selling much because I shouldn't be writing speculative fiction," and once again I'd gotten worked up about Production Production Production and not about writing. In some ways doing something else for a while is not a bad thing. But I'm feeling like getting back to the word count. To get myself back into the swing of writing, I've been thinking about the cosmology of one of my settings, what I call the Quartet World.

Part of the cosmology for this fictional world is that the universe is currently in the third of three stages: steam, water, and ice. Humankind (and the other beings on this world) will return to a union with The Four aspects of Divinity during the second age of steam. Notice that I didn't say this was a Fall from Grace. And of course, having read too much Dion Fortune, my world has a magical system based upon the Tree of Ice, with a Fruit of Steam at the top. I'll have to figure out which culture has the saying, "We are all snowmen in a world of ice."

Probably not the Merfolk, who have a completely different, watery, world view.

☃

My latest creation in Second Life is a candle. When you drop a NoteCard (a plain text file) on the candle, the candle reads its text, sends the text as a chat message, and a flame comes on. You can chat commands to the candle and it will change to one of twelve pre-defined colors; a thirteenth chatted command will extinguish the candle and it will go out with a rising trail of smoke.

I made the candle because I seem to be needing to light candles for people lately. And when I finished, I figured that my virtual candles would make nice gifts for people (especially my gracious hostess who lets me build on her virtual plot of land). Okay, and it's difficult keep real candles lit in our house. And I'm secretly pleased that turning forty-five has not dulled my autodidactism.

Which leads back to the question: what's the difference of lighting a beeswax candle for someone at a physical altar and using a graphical user interface to append a text file of prayers and wishes onto an executable program so that the program echos the text back with an accompanying light show? (Is a flame the tongue of Entropy singing Deity's song?)

The intent for the two candles is the same, (i.e. "I light this flame for X") and I suppose one could argue that the electricity used to run the server where the virtual candle resides counts as the energy of a real flame. And short of raising bees, collecting the wax, and casting the candle, in some ways I have a deeper relationship with my virtual candle -- defining its virtual dimensions and creating the programming to make it function -- than I would with a candle bought at a craft fair. And I could argue that typing out an intention as a way to initiate the virtual flames brings an amount of mindfulness, or at least lexical focus, that is similar to a prayer whispered over a new flame.

So for me, the physical convenience and safety of virtual candles in an electronic world are the biggest difference. After all, a spell or a prayer is a symbolic action taking in a ritual frame of mind. And I'm the sort of person who burns candles for people either because the person has asked for "good thoughts" or else there's nothing else I can do but light a candle.

☃

Yesterday morning, I composed a Haiku in the bathtub. I think that gets me some kind of writer points.

Candle without heat / my virtual beacon shines / Is this steam or ice ?

☃

I go back and forth on re-programming the candle so it will regularly repeat the intention it has been given. I imagine a virtual shrine filled with candles of all colors. Every so often, one of them chats, "For X, who has cancer; and for Y, who is helping them on their journey." Or "For the victims of the Haiti earthquake." Or "For Z, who plays with matches." But then I think, if the candle remembers its intent and I forget, what kind of virtual Demiurge might I be creating?

I think I'll stick with remembering intentions, prayers and wishes on my own.

Quck News

Shoulder Update: Today the PT had me on a bicycle for arms for a short period before manipulating my shoulder. It seemed to loosen things up quite a bit.

Writing Update: I guess I'm in a marketing mode. I've managed to keep stories in the mail. And I need to work on creating new stuff.

Second Life Update: I've created a build for Neo-Pagan ritual with call-and-responses. I suppose that I should offer some of them for sale, which seems a little weird because A) I would be essentially selling religious items and B) they're virtual religious items -- so I guess that counts as being payed for computer programming. Or, I could just give them away... and build other things for sale.

Bad signs from Second Life

General Notes:

• When I photograph things, I'm now thinking, "that would make an interesting texture to apply to the outside of a virtual cube."
  
  
• When I look at an object -- say, a building -- I start to break it down into its simple geometric forms.
  
  
• Thoughts like, "I'll bet if I made a hollow cylinder and then cut it so that only twenty-five percent of the curve showed, it would look like the top of that building's façade."
  
  
• I dreamed the other day that when I touched things, XYZ arrows popped out of them to indicate how far I'd moved them.

Good for writing: If I ever actually hook up with one, I can attend a poetry reading without having to leave my house.

Bad for writing: Second Life sucks more time than housecleaning.

Good for writing: Just like building a story, building a virtual object is a lot easier with a little bit of forethought. So building is an alternate practice for planning things.

Bad for writing: Second Life's creation process is a heck of a lot faster (and more instantly gratifying) than getting published.

Good for writing: It's Research! (Yeah, that's the ticket.) I can probably write about addiction, good and bad on-line social interaction, and I have a better idea of the size of some of the NASA hardware after visiting the NASA SL site. (And I got a free virtual space suit!)

Schrödinger's God Box

In the mid-90's, I used to bring a latex velociraptor puppet named Vaal to meetings, concerts and (to the dismay of my family) gatherings of relatives. I'd even have Vaal read tarot cards for people at parties. I was good enough at it that people would respond to Vaal as if he were the one giving the reading (and most people seemed satisfied with the fortunes they got).

Vaal certainly wasn't a "real" tarot reader in the sense that he wasn't a living being. So does that make him a virtual avatar? To get really existential, who was the author of the fortunes: the cards, me, or Vaal?

Which leads me to Second Life, the on-line game where people create virtual versions of themselves, or avatars, and explore an on-line world filled with virtual objects created by other players.

The latest conundrum is, of course, what are the spiritual and religious ramifications of building a virtual ritual space? If one of the strengths and virtues of Neo-Paganism is the use of imagination, does visiting someone else's virtually constructed ritual space take away from the visitor's imagination? I'd argue it doesn't erode religious imagination any more than visiting a real world church with a fairly set worship order of service.

The problems with a nature-based pantheistic religious event on Second Life are

1. the software that creates the world simplifies everything (so it can run on my computer) and being in second life is like being in a flat cartoon with no shadows, and, um;
2. it's a virtual world with virtual avatars doing virtual things and the "participants" are really in front of keyboards typing commands.

I took my questions of virtual grace to David Raines, who, among other things, is a real live minister. Apparently I contributed to David's insomnia when he read my e-mail at 4 AM asking, "If a priest's avatar gave a parishioner's avatar a virtual host..." Unfortunately, I forgot about Transubstantiation Issues, and the conversation took an unexpected turn.

But David pointed out that "virtual religion" is as old as Christian mass on radio shows. He has issues with the Sacrament of Communion being virtual -- in his view God can use the virtual realm to spread His message, but at this point in time virtual worlds cannot provide all the necessary ingredients -- the sound of bread ripping, the community of parishioners, the smell of the wine, a physical vehicle for the Holy Spirit -- for an efficacious Communion. Yet.

I can see David's point. But at the same time, I wonder -- his comments on radio masses got me thinking. We're used to listening to recordings and broadcasts of orchestral music. Hearing a concert changes my emotional and mental state; if the effects of hearing a piece of music live or recorded are similar enough, at what point does grace require physical reality, especially if outer physical symbols are merely pointers to an inward spiritual state?

For example, in Second Life, I created a magic circle -- a boundary of floating lights enclosing the sacred space of the ritual area. The magic circle in real life is an imaginary boundary, and visualizing it is a signal to Neo-Pagan participants that they are entering a ritual state of mind. A non-Neo-Pagan saw my avatar working on the space, and navigated her avatar closer -- but she stopped her avatar at the edge of the circle. So, an imaginary circle in a virtual world communicated its symbolic meaning to her and had an effect in the real world: she navigated her avatar to the circle's edge but no farther. In her mind, she was on the edge of something, something that looked like a sanctuary.

Which brings us to the locus of the self. Am I or Am I Not my avatar? Does my "self" stop at my skin? I'm legally responsible for my words, and my words can bring me legal tender -- which means in one sense my words are as real as my hands. So is an avatar me, a puppet, or simply "intellectual property"? Remember, puppets can give pretty good tarot readings. I conclude that the question is a bad one: I am my mind and my spirit and my body and my words and my avatar.

At this point, I think navigating an avatar through a set of virtual ceremonies qualifies as a prayer or meditation. What Diety or spirit does from that point on I'm unsure, and the whole thing feels like Schrödinger's Cat meets Deus Ex Machina -- if you don't look, nobody's dead. But of course I must look.

Ultimately, what would matter most is the feeback loop between one and one's religion. In my case, Neo-Paganism instructs me to participate and commune with the divine systems of choice, consequences and randomness entwined in the cosmos -- and as soon as soon as I'm done with this essay I should go for a walk in the woods, because Deity is the wind and virtual logos and flame and tree and leaves and ocean and flicking fishes and....

Graveyard Photos

We visited two graveyards yesterday.


















The contrast between living and stone flowers struck me.
















The second graveyard had a lot of fallen stones.





















The first one is local, and has more grounds keeping.

TMI and Shoulders

Shoulder Update: My physical therapist decided that he wanted an orthopedic specialist to take a look at my shoulder... so...

I visited the specialist. This required filling out various forms that made me wonder how much information the two offices really share (they're on the same computer system...).

I met the doctor, who seemed nice and not like he graduated from high school last June. He seemed amused when I answered "how's your health?" with "Well, I'm 45, I probably don't exercise enough and I could eat better."

After feeling my shoulder it was Off For X-rays! The X-ray machine uses a rotating anode source that is excited by lots of electricity so that its electrons emit gamma rays when the fall back into a more stable electron shell. Got the X-ray tech -- who doesn't read much science fiction -- to admit that the machine read-outs on CSI are from machines that the actors aren't using. Three shoulder X-rays confirm no bone spurs or arthritis. Real-live, honest-to-God, ithiopathic Adhesive Encapsulitis diagnosis confirmed. R-L H-T-G IAE is "rare." The doctor has only seen R-L H-T-G IAE three times in ten years (the others have been fake, I suppose).


This leads to the following Treatment Decision Tree:

• Do nothing -- L-R H-T-G IAE will probably cure itself in a year (or two). Probably there will always be some stiffness. Nobody knows what causes it.
  
  
• Cortisone injection -- Cortisone might loosen up the shoulder for PT to be more effective. It's a local injection, so it won't go all over your body like it was an oral application and suppress your immune system. It can't hurt, and it may help.
  
  
• "Manipulation" -- The doctor knocks me out and makes my shoulder move. Massive PT to follow to keep things limber (and there will probably be some stiffness). Possibility that I'll go to sleep and wake up with a broken arm.
  
  
• "Capsule Release" -- The doctor goes in with an orthoscope and snips away the shoulder capsule to release its death-grip on my humorous. He doesn't think much of the procedure, and prefers to rip (his word) the arm loose.

After a discussion of the side-effects of cortisone, I accepted a shot. This required lying on my side on a foam wedge, a nurse, and Really Big Needles. The numbing spray was cool, but the shot hurt (I had no idea they had spray-on numb spray). Judging by the bandages afterward, I imagine there was blood everywhere (my eyes were closed and I was concentrating on breathing at the time). Driving home felt nice, but I think the spray is wearing off as I type this.

Orders

There's some calcium loss from the humorous bone because I haven't been stressing it -- so eat plenty of calcium pills and vitamin D pills (everyone in Oregon is vitamin D deficient). (I did actually mention broccoli, but I don't think the doctor heard me...)

Don't play baseball or do anything that might hurt because the cortisone kind of makes it hard to feel things. And don't overstretch (but keep doing your PT stretches).

Oh. Right. And check for diabetes, because there's a slight correspondence between R-L H-T-G IAE and diabetes. Sigh.

Tuesday Update.

Second Life continues to intrigue me. Lately, I've been working on creating ritual items for a Wiccan Ritual. I have altars to the East, South and West. I discovered the built-in particle system and accordingly, I've created a "circle of blue flame." Pentagrams are the next step.

Still, as fun as it is, I do fret a little. Ultimately, a Wiccan ritual in Second Life is a bunch of people scattered over the globe typing on their computers while their avatars meet in a virtual space, and seems a little divorced from a spirituality that's supposed to be celebrating in a pantheistic mode. And when I'm feeling pessimistic, I can hear a voice in my head saying, "He couldn't find anyone to do ritual with in one of Oregon's larger cities; so he had to do virtual ritual in cyber-space."

I suppose if religion is all in our heads, the the physical locus of worship has little impact on the validity of its practice.

On other Second Life fronts, I'm trying to think of practical applications. Like, maybe a globe with earthquakes or weather patterns (is NOAA in Second Life?) I've always said that it would be wonderful to have a "holodeck" where I could have the text of various books floating in space. I'd arrange the books chronologically, and then make visible hyperlinks from book to book. I think this is called, "Google Books," or something. So using a game client to hypertext seems like overkill. (And then there's the prim count question: does a book get its own primitive, or each page, or each word? And how do you attach a link to a passage from a book?)

Perhaps somehow painting text onto the inside of a spiral; but again, this has been done by someone else to examine the structure of Frankenstein and Alice in Wonderland. I'm sure there's a metaphor in there, somewhere....


On the writing front. It's been a little slow. [Insert writer's diatribe here -- a partial mix of, "If I worked harder," "If I wrote things editors would buy," and "Isn't this supposed to be fun?"]


On the shoulder front: I did the math and I should basically be doing stretches every two hours. Sigh. So time to stop and stretch