Parkinsons Patients: A Logical Choice for the Advant Garde in Virtual Reality!

So, where are you? I mean it….literally. Just where does your consciousness reside? To what dimensions does it expand itself, and to how small of a non material ball can it become? Like a hermit crab, can it move into any vessel that comes its way?

I’ve been pondering these questions more of late, as I’ve noted with growing concern the gradual seepage of PD symptoms into, what till now, has been the safe harbor of my right side….so long as I could do the hang over there, I’ve been able to compensate fairly well for the interminable tremor and rigidity which Increasingly characterizes my left hand, arm and now leg.

I’m starting feel like I’m being leveraged the ‘hell out of here….here being the body I’ve generally regarded as something ‘I’ fully own. Not the case, as is increasingly more obvious, and clearly a new tenant has taken up occupancy and shows the same singlemindness of purpose that drove our forefathers across the plains in fulfillment of their vision of manifest destiny.

So, I think and I ask: if not here, where do ‘I’ go? And where have ‘I’ gone before…and I think, first about driving.

My dad’s classic ’68 Plymouth Belvedere that I learned to drive…and how difficult it all was to manage up until that magic point where ‘I’ became one with the car….my consciousness expanded to reach to the rusty bumper and back to the tailpipe hung with a hanger which in a previous incarnation held a newly dry-cleaned tweed coat with a cigarette burn on the lapel. That’s when you can drive – when your essential awareness of whatever your driving expands to the full contour of what you’re piloting. Till then – better have some good insurance and a hard head – I remember a few good run-ins with the immovable train trestles of the uptown number 6 train on Westchester Avenue, indeed I do.

Over the years my driving consciousness has contoured itself to operate other memorable vehicles, including a 1973 monkey-shit brown Buick Century (yes, the ‘Kojak’ car), a Chevy Nova, my old favorite ’86 Celica and my current family man sedan, a 2001 Mitsubishi Galant with a skin condition….don’t get me started ‘bout the Mitsubishi. To move on….

I’ve had some fascinating recent experiences futzing around with 3D virtual reality community….second life…...and the beginnings of the strange realization that, yes, it is possible to conceive of – and, even now to actually experience – the beginnings of the porting of your consciousness into an online avatar – and just as the compentent driver is ‘aware’ of his car body, so to does the online avatar become the fringe, and as technology improves no doubt, the focus of consciousness.

So, in recent weeks I’ve experimented with letting my consciousness seep (…hmm…sounds messy) into a variety of avitars including bodies of a winged animal, a Blue Tuxeoed Elvis, a provocatively attired female avatar, and George Bush’s worst fear – a human animal hybrid! What these characters seem to do best, thanks to some amazingly clever programming efforts – is

Dance, dance, dance, with ease and grace and, at times, depraved abandon.

You try that with PD sometimes…..

I remember some time back, maybe around 2000, trying an early 2D chat program and, after a brief interest ( ~ 10 minutes) found the paucity of movement so completely inferior to ‘real’ reality that it held no lasting interest.

But now, two trajectories seem to have crossed – the technology has gotten to a point where it has impact and the movement through the 3D terrain and interaction with ‘others’ has the beginning of depth.

Any my ‘technology’ – i.e my failing wetware which increasingly has difficulty in processing signals in the necessary ways to allow for ease of moment – is on a decline. So as these two trajectories cross the prospect of critical mass – ie. Where an improved virtual reality becomes more enjoyable and compelling than the real thing – a tipping point appears, where, if not just yet, soon we could all be living in a radically transformed reality, with the most disabled here the most ardent adventurers there. Dancing, dreaming, and moving with ease……when this stuff is fully merged with the new field of teledildonics, all bets are off....

Ray Kurzweil, a major figure in modern computer science ( voice recognition software, music synthesis, and futurist extraordinaire) in his provocative “The Age of Spiritual Mmachines' posits that soon…sooner than most think,we will bear witness to the full porting of human consciousness into software.It’s a fascinating premise which, the more I experience the things I’m experiencing, start to seem plausible, possible inevitable.

So, what does the future hold? Stem cell cure? Or maybe a relatively painless decline, drooling and shaking on the outside, while inside, deep with dancing …dancing…dancing with myself…

so till then or something better in day to day reality, on with my virtual blue tuxedo jacket and back to the dance, already in progress…….

Blue Elvis :)

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Banzaii!!!

Dancing in kitchen

Look! An Angel masquerades

As my sweet daughter!

Yesterday pm had one of those moments…..when, when the delicious, mindnumbing and tunnel-vision inducing busyness of being busy with being busy…

It all faded to black me exposed to my feelings and fully confronted by an awareness of what has changed, what is changing and likely will change in the time-arrow of my life.

And it hurt….

.it was/is/ more likely than not will be more difficult, burdensome and burdening that anything that I experience now, which, while problematic at times, in the larger schema of things still ain’t but a pimple on the behind of a giant wooly mammoth.

Its said in the Pirke Avot (Ethics of the Fathers), a book of distilled communal wisdom of Talmudic sages, that there are 3 ‘stances’ between the Buber-esque ‘I and Thou’ one can adopt:

“whats mine is mine and whats yours is yours’

The hallmark of the average man

“whats mine is mine and whats yours is mine”

The credo of an evil man, most 2 year olds, and the IRS.

“whats mine is yours and whats yours is yours”

The operating stance of a Tsadik

AND, curiously, the ultimate ‘stance’ we must all take when, as ever it comes and for the mortal among us come it will, IS the last …i.e. between oneself and the Power-that-be /ribbono shel olum (master of the universe) an ultimate acknowledgment is inevitable that everything that I have that I can lose….everything- from the most tangible to the most ethereal, each and every ability that within a normative healthy phase we fully is assumed as granted….all of it….is/was only on loan.

So, stupid!, why cry over the loss of what you never really had?

BANZAI!!!!!

One little word, how can it mean so many things? "Graceful acceptance of ones destiny"…..still easier said than done.(thanks, Amparo!)

So there I was, momentarily hit/hurt/by the suck-i-ness of this all when, serendipitously, I remembered to put on a new CD with a wonderful Klezmatic version of Shalom Alechem I planned to sing with the family for Shabbat…hit the wrong track and played a hot Eddie Palmieri salsa number----the kind of Bronx Puerto-Riceno soundtrack of my youth sort of thing….

and just then a little angel impersonating my youngest daughter took my hand and led me to the white-tile dancefloor that is our kitchen and there we were, back in Orchard Beach, on a sunny day with Salsa blaring from competing boom boxes to the smell of roasting g-d knows what in the warm setting sun. I was summoned back to earth only by the pungent smell of yellow rice burning to black...

Banzaii!!!