On The Trail Of My Avatar (my virtual self is always the best).

As the sun sets on a cold and sunny Sunday, recovering from a mild case of exhaustion due to overwork, I tend to feel the blues of the moment: a sense of spleen and vanitas. So googling up my own name seems as good a way as any to get some distraction and a change of perspective. My web persona is in fact infinitely more interesting than my own boring self. It is the result of casual contributions building up to a portrait larger than life, sometimes strange, mostly unexpected and fascinating as it would be to fathom the greatest mystery, that of what do the others really think of us. Every link is a dot on the line to draw the full picture of this virtual hero, a kind of avatar. But unlike those projected characters, leading their life on the web on the strength of their maker’s wishes, this one has a mind of his own: a way of popping up in strange places, of getting confused in homonymy and lost in anonymity, strangely true to life at times but then mostly as fantastic as those others. Fact is that we all leave a trail on the web, little is lost once put in, and even the tiniest of actions can set a ripple of vibrations on the surface of the communal pond. Whether this effect has any influence on our existence is open to debate. I guess it does.

Having followed the trail for a while I was able to delete some old ads I had put out to sell stuff, and forgot about. Then enjoyed for a while the trip, as egos do, and felt better about myself. Old recensions, news, some links that I couldn’t follow through that lead as far as the Baghdad museum of art (?) and deep into the unknown blue forests of German poster publishing, others much closer to home and still unexpected. Then the effect slowly wore off, and it was high time to log out. Mhm, this could get addictive although I haven’t’ worked out if this hobby would be closer to onanism or substance abuse. Better to quit either way, bearing in mind that the greatest danger would be to absorb these concoctions of casual information as if they were reality. It boils down to what the others and we chose to believe, and what our minds make of it. Much like our moods really.