Blog #9 The reading response

The fans are screaming as I leave the dressing room and head for the bus. And scream they should, we totally rocked Chicago the last three nights. I grab my “precious”, the 1969 Fender Telecaster once played by Neil Young at Woodstock and sign few autographs. Up the bus steps and into my private little suite, and the band is headed to Detroit for 2 sold out shows at the something arena. The drive gives me a little time to write. James Cameron wants me to nail a theme song for some new movie of his. And he promised me a cameo. He says he likes our rough style and raw energy and it fits his vision for the film, something called Avatar. Must be about technology or something, online games or MySpace. Crap, after Titanic, I thought he'd try something a little bit more elaborate.....

Oops, sorry, just daydreaming there. Spending time in my “avatar”, or as we called it in the old days, imagining, or having a secret identity. Yeah, the good old 70s when we were forced to go to burger joints and hang out. And you couldn't “text” your friends to have them meet you there. If you were late one day after school, you just missed out. And then, the horror, you went home and did something called “playing outside”. Oh, it was miserable! Using tree branches as weapons and restaging the Battle of Iwo Jima in our huge backyard with some of the neighborhood kids.

I am commenting on the first 3 readings, Alter Egos: Avatars and Their Creators by Julian Dibbell, where he describes what it's like to create an online character for gaming, and the sensation it gives him, being someone who he is not. Also the Facebook article and Someone to Watch Over Me, where Theodora Stites gives a graphic picture of her extensive networking endeavors.

The rock star was my Avatar, before I knew what the term meant, a way to escape the fascism of my parents and the abuse of my father, mainly the trips to the woodshed, a literal one, and a leather belt. My avatar was very detailed in his creation and personality, even though he was just a friend in my head. One day when I “grew up”, and shortly after seeing U2's Zoo TV concert, I decided to write a novel about the guy, kill him at the end and then I would be done with him. Well, good thing I had a swing shift job and a lousy marriage, so I could come home at midnight, write till 4 or 5 and then sleep and go to work. 10 months and 5 rejection letters later, I had a 440,000 word albatross I wasn't quite sure what to do with. I could have self published if I had $5000. But at least I did kind of exhaust the idea of the character. This was in the early 90s before the tech explosion and online gaming communities came to be. And maybe that's a good thing or I would never have escaped fantasy and tried to exist in the real world.

I consider myself a moderate Facebook user and I don't have a MySpace page. The best thing about Facebook has been finding some old friends, but I am just not getting the response I need to my highly witty posts. Nor can I seem to convince others that my man crush with Brett Favre during this NFL season was highly sarcastic. But it is strange how these things dominate culture, and isolate us to our private dens where we type and network but have no real contact. I think this point was brilliantly portrayed in the movie WALLE, with the shipmates using their screens to communicate, even when they were 2 feet apart.