Really Real

Human existence strikes you two ways: you're just one among many millions, or you're the only one that counts. You walk between those two roads your whole life, and where those two roads intersect, you've got synchronity, coincidence, fate - the grasping sensation that everything is connected. When I was traveling in Eastern Europe, I read a copy of Bulgakov's "Master and Margarita" that I borrowed from my brother. One day on a train, I put aside the book, picked up a magazine, turned a few pages, and found a reference to Bulgakov nestled into a sidebar. (It was "The Economist," natch.) Five days later, drunk and wandering for my life in Unpronounceable Ljubljana, I snapped a picture of the poster for a new opera that was just about to hit town:

This kind of thing happens all the time when you get older. Two weeks ago, I signed up for a free trial membership to World of Warcraft. The following week, I started reading Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash," a book which roughly invented the term "avatar" and certainly was a seminal work in the conception of a digital playspace that would be only slightly more hyperrealistic than our own overcrazy reality. Like most near-futures, the book is cagey about dates, but since the 35-year-old protagonist claims a birthday in the 70s, you could frankly conclude that the book takes place in 2008 - and, barring a few turns of the crazy wheel, you could equally argue that Stephenson's vision has more or less come true.

One of the many sidelong tangents which "Snow Crash" throws at the world of tomorrow involves the creation of genuine digital faces - how it took the invention of genuine, as opposed to plastic, digital emotion in order to make the digital world as palpable as the real one. The same week I read "Snow Crash," this video hit the internet.

Books that you like have a strange quality of seeming wholly necessary to the specific time of life in which you read them. Let me rephrase. It's impossible for me to imagine reading "Snow Crash" at any other time - it's focus on digital reality, its vision of a world happily ruled by corporations rather than governments, feels directly linked to my own concerns of the moment. But I first picked up "Snow Crash" three years ago, off of a friend's recommendation; read the first two chapters and then stopped right away, not because they were bad, but because the first two chapters of "Snow Crash" are so breakneck that the third chapter hits you like an instant comedown (a good friend once argued that the whole book never lives up to its opening, although sometimes I think you could arguet that about everything besides "The Great Gatsby.")

Similarly, right now I'm powering through a graphic novel series called "Transmetropolitan," a vaguely dystopic urban future which follows the travails of journalist Spider Jerusalem, a slightly britified Hunter S. Thompson. In Book 3 of "Transmetropolitan," Spider begins following the Presidential Election, which is pitting a fat shifty capitalist incumbent stooge against a bright shiny younger contender, who's nickname and general political platform are the same: "The Smiler." Spider despises the incumbent President, a thuggish cigar chomper out of the Warren G. Harding school. Yet he comes to despise his opponent even more, because, despite his call for change, he essentially offers the same gruesome money politics as before.

Meanwhile, in present-day reality, Matt Taibbi, often compared to Hunter S. Thompson though more like a modern-day H. L. Menken, just wrote a column in which he unblinkingly and unhappily points out how achingly similar Obama's fundraising tactics are to those who've come before - people named Clinton, but also people named Bush.

The real world is endlessly complicated. In the World of Warcraft, I created a new character, an Elf named Mcarthur. That puts me on both sides of the ongoing Horde/Alliance war. This strikes me as a wholly sane method for living two lives, although now I can't help but wonder if, when I'm not playing, my characters are dreaming of each other.