Feed me no lies (I don't know about you).

I'm  on Facebook, drafting my latest status. It's going to comprise the following elements: Sunday, mild weather, hot chocolate, and listening to records, and it's going to be accompanied by a picture of my new record shelf, which sadly looks less populated than I thought it would with all my records on it. I'm a little uncertain of posting evidence of my less than spectacular record collection. I often think about what people think my life is like versus how it really is, based on how I carefully craft my online persona. I'm proud of my creation, I think. To look at my photos, you wouldn't think I'm a day over 25.

I try not to whine too much in my statuses. I like to check in when I'm at museums and galleries, or out with friends at swanky joints. I try to avoid posting too many pictures of meals, but I do post pics of drinks, whether we're talking a $4 domestic beer or a $12 cocktail inspired by a Stanley Kubrick film.

I respect my audience enough to edit my posts if I make a grammatical or spelling error. Maybe most people wouldn't notice, but for the few who would, I abhor the idea of disappointing them with English language fails.

And yeah, I get jealous of people who post about their travels, even though I've done my own fair share, and they usually go to Cuban or Dominican resorts and I can think of a million other places I'd rather be than those. There's that meme that keeps going around about comparing everyone else's highlight reel to your cutting room floor, or something like that.

I've spent a good 20 minutes editing and rewriting my status, and I'm finally about to hit "Post" when I get careless and instead of hitting "Enter" I hit a random assortment of keys on my laptop.

But instead of having to delete some extra keystrokes on the screen, or having to manually restart my frozen computer, I'm the one who freezes up. My hands are resting on the keyboard, and all I can do is watch with horror as the flesh converts into scripts of code. The code conversion quickly moves up my arms, and I see that the code is now getting sucked into the monitor.

My head is the last to transport, and I travel through a space odyssey warp of light and colours and shapes and sounds and characters until I finally arrive on the other side... inside the web.

It looks nothing like I thought it would. I kind of expected there to be green matrixy code oozing down the walls. But nope. I'm kind of still in my living room, but the walls flicker with the images of my Facebook feed updating in real time. Everyone who is actively typing or posting images... I can see them behind the scenes, editing their own typos, or not... choosing a photo, then deleting it... Wow. This is the digital equivalent of watching all my friends and family in the bathroom. I think I need to get out of here.

The floor under my feet displays a browser. Tapping my foot in the browser search bar, an electronic keyboard appears. I dance across the keyboard, typing characters into the address field. Where shall I go? If I can go anywhere in the Internet universe, where would I like to be? I know. My favourite place in the world. An art gallery, any art gallery.

Whenever I'm at a gallery, I get this daydream about moving in. Setting up my bedroom in one of the modern art rooms, so that I can gaze upon works by Van Gogh or Picasso or Kandinsky or Monet from the comfort of my bed. If I remember correctly, Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is part of MoMA's permanent collection. I think I'll go there.

I waltz along the floor to enter MoMA's URL and then foxtrot in the site's search bar to find what I seek. And there I am, admiring Picasso's work. Outstanding. I'm quite enjoying this trip into the digital world after all. It's like that daydream I used to have as a kid, where I was living in a department store, and after the store would close at night, I would jump on the beds and play with all the toys and eat a bunch of candy, before falling asleep on a big comfy couch in the furniture section.

Sadly there are some limitations in the virtual world. I can't just conjure up a bed next to Desmoiselles or any other work of art for that matter. I still can only see it the way it has been established virtually. Because of that, I'm the only one here. Well, really I'm not. Thousands of people are visiting the site via their computers, but I'm the only one inside the digital world, seeing things the way no one else ever has.

And then he comes around the corner. The man whose name I never learn. He's about my age, but has a lonely, dejected look about him. He has terrible posture, sad grey eyes, downturned mouth, worry lines on his forehead, and a tripping sort of gait, even across the smooth floor. He is absolutely startled to see me. He gasps loudly and steps back, staring at me. Finally he stutters his way through the words "What are you doing here?"

"I accidentally uploaded myself to the Internet", I tell him. I ask him what he's doing here, and he tells me he made the choice over a decade ago. He found life in the real world to be intolerable. Life on the Internet was far more enjoyable, and he found himself spending all of his waking life in virtual worlds anyway. He arrived via Second Life, having deliberately figured out how to get in. He's been here ever since.

He hasn't actually spoken face to face to a real person since he got here more than ten years ago, he tells me as he stares at the floor. I ask him if anyone in the real world might be missing him, but he assures me that's not the case.

I ask him if he wouldn't mind showing me around the virtual world a bit, since he's obviously familiar with the place, but he declines, telling me that he's on a caper at the moment and really shouldn't have stopped to talk to me at all; now he'll have to erase his browser history in order to delete me from his virtual memory.

Using the floor browser, he navigates himself away from me, leaving me on my own again.

I really could spend the rest of my life in here too, I think, but unlike the sad man, I know I would be missed. I wish I had thought to ask him how to get home. And just because I'm thinking about potentially being stuck here, suddenly it occurs to me that I'm lonely. I really wish the sad man hadn't been so repelled by the idea of hanging out with me. It sure would be nice to take this trip with someone.

Alas, it is not to be. I suppose I could navigate to someplace with lots of "people", but they wouldn't be real, they'd just be the coded versions of themselves, their bodies and souls photoshopped to beyond perfection. Liars, all of them. I begin to ache for home, to be back in the tangible world where at least the coffee table I stubbed my toe on this morning delivers some form of truth.

And with that, it occurs to me that I'm thirsty.

I'm not quite sure where I might find something to drink here, so I simply Google "water" and scan my options. I find a Wikipedia entry which isn't of much use, several articles about contaminated water which will obviously not do, and a link to a water-themed amusement park, which promises to be chlorinated and unpalatable, filled with human detritus.

I try to search virtual MoMA for the bathroom where I might find a fountain or a tap, but of course, these things don't exist in MoMA's website.

I decide to Google "Lake Superior" - the largest source of fresh water in North America. Even if it hasn't been purified, it'll wet my kidneys. I click on a beautiful image of a sandy beach surrounded by deep blue water, and I'm transported to the virtual location, relieved to find the lake water lapping deliciously upon the shore. And even though it's winter in the real world, it's nice and... not warm exactly, but comfortable in the virtual world.

I dip my cupped hands into the lake to take a sip, but suddenly I'm shocked to find that instead of actual water, my hands contain a liquid form of code. Can I drink code? I myself am now comprised of it, am I not? Will this quench my thirst?

Oddly it does. I assume that's how the sad man has been able to survive over here for so long.

My thirst quenched, I feel a desire to lay on the beach and enjoy the serenity of this peaceful place, but also conflicted with a need to see as much of the virtual universe as possible. I have at my fingertips -- rather, my feet -- access to the myriad places, people, and things I have always wanted to see and experience for myself, but I assume I only have a limited amount of time in which to satisfy my curiosity.

And I do have to work tomorrow...which presents the problem of how exactly do I get home?

As I turn around to look at the forest behind me, I'm suddenly bombarded with ads, right up in my face, whizzing through space and stopping mere inches from the end of my nose. I stumble back a bit. The ads are for flights to "Home" -- several offers at competing prices, from different companies.

I consider these options. I suppose I could navigate to my bank account online and buy one of these flights. I have to admit, I'm kind of dying to look out the window and see what it looks like traveling across the border between this virtual world and the real world. But despite the competitive pricing, it's still way more than I want to pay. At $174, 691.82, flying form "virtuality" to reality is pretty damn expensive, and also sadly exceeds my bank account balance and credit limit combined. There has got to be a better way.

Suddenly, the clouds move in overhead, and it begins to rain. But this isn't just any rain from just any cloud. I'm being showered with data and images... old files and pictures are falling from the sky, littering the beach, hitting me on the way down. Some of them are only a kilobyte or two, but others are much heavier and hurt when they hit me, even leaving bruises. Not knowing what's in the forest ahead of me, I decide to  navigate away from here.

I Google my address and navigate to street view. Magically, I am transported to my house... but something's wrong. I'm standing outside on the green grass of my front yard by the tree swing, and it's a beautiful, warm sunshiny day... in the middle of January. Then I realize that I'm still in the virtual world, standing outside my virtual house. It's winter in the real world, but there is no snow here. I have arrived here via the photo taken by Google Earth at some other point in time, back in the past before I moved here. That's not my cat in the window or my car in the driveway.

Sigh. Well at least I'm no longer getting rained on by old files from the cloud. But there's not a lot I can do here.

I sit on the swing for a moment and ponder my next move. I'm finding it a bit depressing that I could literally go anywhere I want, and all I want to do is go home and spend the rest of my Sunday evening in the comfort of my home, drinking hot chocolate and listening to records, just like I said I was doing on Facebook. What does it say about me that I feel like a liar that my current status doesn't actually match my Facebook status?

And that's when I realize that since I've uploaded myself to the Internet, the only way I'm going to get home is by downloading myself back into the real world.

I jump off the swing and run out to the road. Thankfully it's a quiet street. I tap the pavement with my foot and the browser appears. I tap the search box to bring up the virtual keyboard. I dance clumsily across the keyboard, spelling out the address for my email provider. I log in and compose an email to myself...no, wait... how can I download the attachment if I'm not there? I change the recipient to Chad, and type the subject "Open when you are home". I add myself as an attachment and hit send. And I wait.

I'm bored here on the swing, when there is so much else out there... and but I know that if I move from this location, the attachment link might get broken, so I sigh and continue swinging. Suddenly, I begin transforming into code once more, and within seconds, I am home.

Chad leaps out of his seat as I appear in the living room. His exclamation of "what the fuck?!" is soon followed by a knowing look. This project has taken me to some crazy places. Remember that time he pulled me out of the TV and saved me from the zombies? There is no need to explain, so we settle down on the couch and he starts The Grand Budapest Hotel over again from the beginning.

*****

I'm not entirely sure I know what to say about this album. There are a few warm spots, but overall it left me a bit cold. Having said that, the appearance vs. reality theme is evident throughout, and I started thinking about the realities that we manufacture for ourselves on the Internet, the way we tell our friends and loved ones half-truths about ourselves, the reality we would like them to believe... that we ourselves would like to believe.

And yet, in the choice between living in a virtual place where you can have anything you want versus a real one where you can't, reality seems like the better of the two.

I suppose this album has put me into an introspective state, but the thoughts are not the kinds of thoughts I want to put out there for all to see... and I'm sure they're the kinds of thoughts no one wants to read. Self doubt and fear of failure and giving way too many fucks about way too many things. So instead...