Monday, August 4, 2008

Cooked

Back from the beach with 3rd degree burns over 40 percent of my body. My wife is in worse shape. I like beaches, but I'm not at all sure exactly what the point of lying in the sun and burning our skin is. It is hot, uncomfortable, and changes skin color from either a deep red to a brown or a bronze. This, to some people, is desirable. This, to me, is cooking. There are specific reasons why people don't climb into ovens at home to recreate. There is a mind set...oh never mind.

We had a pretty decent time over there. I don't say great time because one of our favorite institutions, Pinheads, was gone. It was a place that combined pizza and bowling, and, believe me, it was one of the classiest institutions in town.

I spent a lot of time at the beach, while the UV rays were having a laugh at my expanse, looking for shells. On our first day there the beach was littered with them. Thousands upon thousands of pieces of small broken shell, with only a few intact ones. When we got back to our room, I thought about this. The true marvel at the beach was the quantity of the shells, and who was to say that the broken ones were in any way less desirable the the ones that hadn't broken yet. My wife thought about this and agreed, and thought of a wonderful craft project she could use with the broken shells. Our second trip to the beach revealed almost NO shells of any sort. Our third and final trip revealed only fully intact shells. You can't win for losing. I suppose we can take a hammer to the fully intact shells we collected, but that sorta spoils the whole point of my original pithy observation. Mother nature has a wonderful way of fucking with our minds.

We came home to find that the pfkat had stolen BOTH of our chairs from our den for her new studio. I am now sitting in a fru fru wussy-assed kitchen chair instead of the leather-like, black, manly-man chair I usually sit in. This situation WILL be rectified.

I had a dream last night that somehow on my first day of school our 1st grade class had been scheduled to have a boxing match against the sixth graders. I, being the shortest kid in class (this was never the case in real life, incidently), was scheduled first, to fight the tallest of the sixth graders. The "event" got canceled. I kept waiting for the opportunity to use my joke, "I would have given his shins a beating that they never would forget," but the dream suddenly had me forgetting to bring a plate of cupcakes down to a stage, so I never got the opportunity. I found this disapointing. Reflectively, why I should find that not having the oportunity for one aspect of my dream self to tell another aspect of my dream self a rather "roll the eyes" joke disappointing is one of those great psychological mysteries of life.

I have one day of actual work, then almost two weeks of ... um ... self-improvement classes in a group setting. I'm hoping to get a lot out of them.

Love and peace to all of you. Alphonsus would rather I have my own blog rather than take over his, so I'll be doing that as soon as I have the time. In the mean time, talk to you all later.

Friday, August 1, 2008

NEW OWNERSHIP


Greetings to all. Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Steve. I am Alphonsus' animator. Alphonsus has not been making too many appearances of late, so I thought I'd take over for him for a while, if not indefinitely.

I brought Alphonsus into Second Life more than 2 years ago. He has always been within me, however. I'm not going to go into detail in an attempt to describe the relationship between Alphonsus and I. We are very much alike in that I've never tried to make him into something that I am not myself. In some ways, he is more than me. In other ways, he is naive to the functioning of the real world. I am as well, but the the problem is far more pronounced with him.

Another person whom I animate in Second Life is a chocolate colored, blond brat by the name of Hestia Enoch. This will not come as a surprise to most of you, as I have never tried to hide it very much. Many of you have deduced it, others I have told directly. The relationship between Hestia and I is far more complicated. She is still very much me, but she is an experiment with aspects of myself that I have not heretofore explored. She is thus fascinating to me, and I find her thus somewhat more fun to animate that Alphonsus. She is also as cute as the dickens.

This post, however, is not about either Alphonsus or Hestia. It is about me; the real life component of this strange trio. Unlike the others, I am not a perfect specimen of human physique. I am 45, approximately 35 pounds overweight (although I carry it well), far balder than the majority of my like-aged brethren, and I find that my ability to "fly" is limited to instances that last less than a second and do not achieve impressive heights, or, if starting from an impressive height, goes exclusively in one direction and ends somewhat painfully in the end. My attempts at weight loss through the "All Pizza" diet has thus far proved unsuccessful, which defies reason.

I am married to a beautiful if somewhat perplexing woman, and live in a very suburban home in a suburb of Detroit, Michigan. I have been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder, which is supposedly somewhere on the Autism spectrum. This, to me, says very little, as I suspect that everyone falls SOMEWHERE on the autism spectrum. I happen to like my place on it, and I pity you Attention Surplus people who worry too much about the inconsequentials of life. Some people I suspect fall on the negative end of the autism spectrum, and are undoubtedly labeled with some other weird disorders with cool abbreviations that shrinks like to go on about.

I have also been diagnosed with depression, which comes and goes with me much as it does with most people, but it is somewhat more debilitating to me when it comes than it might be to the average human. Most of my emotional adventures are journaled elsewhere private, and will not be the subject of this blog. I may mention them from time to time, as depression combined with ADD can be quite entertaining if looked at from the correct perspective.

In sharing my real life adventures, I will be limited somewhat by my insistence on maintaining the privacy of others. The number one person whose privacy I consider important is my wife, who in Second Life is known as Princess Ivory. All I will say about her is that she is indeed a woman, her age is somewhere between 18 and 90, and she is the love of my life.

While I have not been spending a lot of time animating my alter-egos in Second Life of late, my life in real life has gone on largely unabated. Hence my need to shift this blog's focus from the virtual world to the so-called real one. Alphonsus had nothing much to say. I, however, do, thus the time has come for him to step aside and let me take over.

I don't wish to go on forever with this introduction to myself. There is much to say, but I have many years in which to say it. It is better to say in palatable sound bites as opposed to long epics. Love and peace to all of you, both my Second Life friends and their real life counterparts.

Steve