So, the time has come to talk about a certain young lady, who seems to occupy a central position in my life; who, in a very bizarre way has actually managed to acquire a life of her own – an almost separate personality that is quite capable of evoking changes and responses in me, I might add. A decade or so ago, I used to do these visualization exercises, that were also somewhat related to magick. One of them involved getting your thumb to talk back to you and I was extremely good at it, I must say. So, I think Alpha’s origins lie in there somewhere, in all of my readings on Aleister Crowley… I was ready for her, I think. (Oh, and incidentally, no I do not practice magick or anything of the sort. My interest in all of that was to help me to get through a particularly emotionally turbulent period. So, really, no occult interests whatsoever over here…)
Alpha was born on March 5th 2007. She arrived in this world screaming to know where the appearance tab was – she had to do something about how she looked for god’s sakes!!!! Did Linden Labs think she would spend even a nano-second in these dreadful jeans and purple shirt??? And those flip-flops??? And that cardboard hair???? Please… please… PLEASE!!!
In the event, it took her only a short time to sort out her shape (luckily her human did know her way around Poser) and she very swiftly replaced the noob uniform with a black jumpsuit and boots but the rest took longer, of course. Finding her way to the Free Dove where she got her first freebie flexi hair took a couple of days but skin turned out to be a much bigger problem: I have this compulsion to make Alpha look like Elif. A huge part of this does have to do with the thumb syndrome I was talking about, but in the beginning there were other reasons as well. Anyway, finding a skin in Second Life, that looked right, that would make Alpha’s expression somewhat similar to mine in RL took months! Finally, quite by accident Alpha stumbled upon the Mami Skin that these days Cory Edo is actually giving away as a freebie (!)…
During all this time Alpha went into Second Life every day, completely alone, completely lost. I was not at all sure what I was doing, what I was looking for, or looking at even. I had suffered a huge bereavement in Real Life very recently and part of it was an escape for sure… To a certain extent, I was reminded of all the psychotropic trips that I had been on in earlier years – the altered state of being… I saw very ugly landscapes and buildings… I teleported to art galleries where the work displayed had me lost in total amazement at the futility of it all. Why create things in a place which offers you a chance for an altered state of being/expression that look exactly like the sort of stuff you would churn out in Real Life, I wondered?… I joined groups and went to meetings – only to immediately drop them… I attended some educational conferences only to be gobsmacked by the vapidity of it all… I went to a lot of live music events: I found that the best ones were classical music events, so I joined a group for that… And also the Bliss Basin, where they did have some nice concerts I guess… I made some acquaintances but nothing earth shattering… So, when all is said and done, I did not see or do anything that was in any way rewarding or would have provided a reason to stay on – but I did anyway… Somehow, through all of this, somewhere I saw the glimmerings of what this place could be: It left you alone to do what you wanted to do. And given the right circumstances it could provide a matrix for a vast transformation of self thorough make belief and play. True, no one that I observed around me in those early days seemed to be engaged in anything of the sort, but I somehow managed to recognize this embedded attribute within the system nonetheless. And that is why I stayed…
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