Certain online communities just freak me right the fuck out. MySpace is at the top of the list. It is full of fear and horror for me. I step in carefully to read Monica’s blog and then flee. Dating sites have a similar vibe. LiveJournal isn’t quite as bad.

But what occurred to me is that the realization of Gibson’s and Stephenson’s cyberspace isn’t 3D virtual reality worlds. It isn’t that we will represent ourselves as glowing avatars of various form and resolution. The blogsphere has become our virtual reality. Here we stake out territories and populate them with iterations of ourselves, projections constructed in profiles and posts. Blogs are a kind of spiritual real estate where other people don’t just interact with *us* but with us at a specific moment in time. It’s TiVo for communication, our life timeshifted. Want to interact with the Drey from a week ago? Scroll down the page. Want to discuss the events of a certain day? It’s in the archive.

Tags: Life, MySpace

Despite the grief this whole saga caused me, this has recently been filed under Amusing Anecdote.

I typically do not discuss my relationships here, since I don’t believe it is fair to discuss the details of some other life without their permission. But I think I can make an exception here because this person doesn’t actually exist.

A couple months ago I was contacted by someone on my MySpace friends list, wanting to get to know me a bit more. I had a tendancy to add people to my friends list for no good reason. So I had some people on there I didn’t really know very well. So I started having a conversation with this woman, Chassity, and it turned out we had a great deal in common. We had phone conversations that lasted hours and hours. We really seemed to be hitting it off.

After about a month or so, we decided to meet for coffee. This precipitated a series of debacles in Chassity’s life that I won’t go into now because it would take too long. Anyhow, we weren’t able to meet. I was disappointed, but understanding. She said we could have dinner the following week, which didn’t happen. From that point on, whenever I brought up the topic of meeting for coffee or whatever, I would get no response. Somehow, despite wanting desperately to meet me, she never had a single spare hour in which we could meet. So I eventually gave up on the idea and we communicated less and less frequently.

A few weeks ago I was contacted by one of Chassity’s MySpace friends. Her friend hadn’t heard from Chassity in a while, she didn’t return emails and her home phone had been disconnected. Her friend thought that surely she would respond to me. By now our online relationship had become the stuff of legend amongst all of her MySpace friends. So I wrote an email, checking in on this mysterious woman. Of course, I received no reply. Her phone was indeed disconnected. Since her friend seemed really worried, I called up the radio station where Chassity had worked for the past eight years. No one there had ever heard of her. The receptionist, the radio personnel, her “boss”… none of them knew her name or description.

I felt the floor drop away from me as I entered some other realm. I wrote this guy I knew had met her in person because Chassity talked about hanging out with him, watching a movie. He said they had never met. I reported this all back to her worried friend. Then she said, “Well, YOU’VE met her in person, right?” I explained Chassity and I had never met. Her friend thought this rather odd because Chassity had given a detailed account of when we met at a goth club.

I was completely floored. Who was this person? Why had she fabricated this completely fictional life and deceived all of her friends online? Not just me, but at least 20 people. What did she have to gain from this?

I wanted to see if anything she had told me was true. Chassity had claimed to have performed in a play produced by a local theater group. I contacted the theater to find out more about the play. They had never produced the play she described nor did they recognize her. For whatever reason, she made up this play, described to me the plot and her role in it. Just like that, without missing a beat. But why?

What was true and what was a lie? The performance she gave was Oscar worthy. The nuances and tedious details of her daily workday… why would someone take the trouble to concoct all of that? For a while this really intrigued me. I wanted to know what had motivated this person to lie so convincingly about her life to so many people.

But then I got angry. I had trusted this person. We had discussed at great length the value of being genuine and how I had been burned so many times by fake people. She insisted she was real. She said her friends doubted *my* existence, that *I* sounded too good to be true. Everything we talked about, the emails, the long conversations, the discussions about spirituality, art, movies, video games, they did not add up to someone who was a liar. It still doesn’t add up.

After this roller coaster of feelings I rode with Chassity, I am left with this waking dream lesson: The person who is genuinely attracted to me and interested in me as a person does not exist. Chassity is the last in a long line of women who either vanish or only want me for something in particular, discarding me when they are done. I have seen little evidence that there is any other kind of woman.

So if you happen to see this person, chances are you don’t know her. Chances are that no one does. Chances are this isn’t her at all.

Tags: Life, MySpace

Surveys and quizzes abound on MySpace and I have become quite addicted to them. As with most things I like, I eventually had to create my own. I present to you the Drey Survey.

1. You are walking alone on a forest path when you come upon what you are certain is a portal leading to some other world. You sense that it will close soon with no guarantee of ever opening again. Do you go through the portal? Why?

2. In what situation is it acceptable to tell a lie?

3. What manner of death would you find the most unpleasant?

4. What is a recurring theme in your dreams and how does it apply to your waking life?

5. You discover a video file on your computer. The file name is TrueLove.avi. It is 10 seconds long. What would you see if you played the file?

6. You are successful at something in life, but you may be reluctant to call it “success,” reserving that label for goals you have yet to achieve. What is that success?

7. What is your most irrational fear? What is your most rational one?

8. You see a man seated at a restaurant. A small globe of blue flame hovers above his palm. When he notices you watching, the globe evaporates and he turns his attention to the menu. What is the most likely explanation for this event? What do you wish to be true in this case?

9. You wake up one morning to find a digital timer grafted to your chest, just above your heart. It immediately starts counting down from twenty-four hours. How do you spend the time between twenty-four and zero? How is this different from the way you spend time now?

10. You are cleaning out your attic and find an old shoebox you’ve never seen before. Written on the lid in your own handwriting is the phrase “You are ready for this now.” What is inside the box?

11. In the future, enlightenment is available in an over the counter gel capsule. Its effects are indistinguishable from enlightenment gained through years of seeking. Do you take the pill?

12. You want to stop doing that One Thing, but you don’t. Why?

13. What question is missing from this survey?

Tags: Life, MySpace

Today a friend complained that I don’t post often enough, so I’ll make more of an effort. Actually, it seems like when I am focusing on one certain activity in my life, I experience a kind of time distortion with everything else. If I get busy with work, I’ll look up and it will have been a week since I made a post in Frayed, the email interactive fiction project I’m running. Or I’ll spend what seems like a few hours on MySpace, and then suddenly the movies I rented are overdue. I lose track of what is going on in the books I’m reading because I’ve been more interested in working in the yard.

But it feels fantastic! I feel like there are so many possibilities for each day and I have so many interests I wish to pursue. I just kind of chuckle at myself when a deadline suddenly looms or it is Sunday again already and I need to set things up for the weekly Doctor Who showing.

I think what I’m saying is that I’m comfortable with the flow of time again. It doesn’t seem like sand spilling away into oblivion. Nothing grows in stasis. If time stood still and I could “hold this moment a little bit longer,” nothing would ever actually happen to me.

Tags: Life, MySpace, reft

I see that the Granite Industries knock-off has once again tracked me down to this site. He even tried to create an account in my name. Fortunately my countermeasures were successful and he’s been blocked. His photo still shows up, though, which could prove confusing to other people.

Tags: MySpace

So here I am on MySpace again, against my better judgment. Once again I was swayed by the superior sex. Perhaps this time things won’t go down as they did before, what with the pillar of fire and the hostages. Poor Sven took a dagger in the back for me. Ironically it was the same blade I had given Cherise on the anniversary of her marriage to the duke.

Well, we shall see what transpires this time around.

Tags: MySpace