Renaissance

by Jack Lefebvre

"Football, beer, cars, cricket, darts, pool, women."
       The words lay in his skull, heavy, echoing. The list had been repeated so often, with the same laughs, minor adjustments to the order. Sometimes they found space for things such as pork pies or Ibiza but, in the catalogue of the most important things in life, football (the British kind) always came first and women last. (Except for those occasions when wives were on the list. They were last then. Definitely. No question.) He laughed along with the rest, but hated himself for doing so. He hated that women were commodities, that love was a transaction. How the hell did these guys still find their reduction of experience to such mindless limits entertaining? Were their perceptions really that narrow? Was life so universally drab?
       He switched on the television; yes, it seemed it was. Another set of anonymous celebrities were being inane in a wholly artificial ‘real’ environment, squealing at the prospect of having to eat maggots, desperately trying to be like what one of them called ‘ordinary people’, unaware that that’s exactly what they were. Everywhere, it seemed, people responded to mediocrity. No wonder so many were choosing to live a second life. Oh, there were thousands of Neanderthals in SL, too – strutting avatars with limited vocabularies which they supplemented with grunts – but there was also an unashamed dimension of myth and mystery. Dark forces howled in the midnights, elves and furry creatures prowled, but also, moving quietly amongst them, were real, soft, gentle people – people who talked, who were curious about one another. He could avoid the crassness, the fantasies and phantasms, and be as simple or as complex as he wanted.