Virtually Real

Many years ago - certainly over a decade ago - I discovered Apple Computer. Shortly after that I discovered 3D modeling, and I fell into a mental hole. I spent countless hours sitting at my computer building 3D worlds. I could build mountains, lakes, houses, drop in people, trees, rocks, and even animate the whole thing. The software was pretty crude back then, but these days we're only limited by our technical skills and our imagination. And probably our budget too. Software and hardware ain't cheap.

I remember once I had stayed up for 48 hours straight sitting in a darkened room in front of my computer snacking on junk food and building a world - rather, a scene from a world - that existed in my mind. I was stiff, my neck hurt, my eyes were bloodshot, and I just felt mushy, like my body was a wax figure in a tin shed. In Laredo. In August. I felt bad. I remember pushing back from my computer and looking at what I had created. I didn't really know what time or even what day it was. I had completely missed two sunrises and two sunsets and I had indigestion. But my little picture was neat.

This wasn't the first time I'd spend an entire weekend doing this. What was I really doing here? I was wasting entire weekends putting my body and my mind through this torture just to rebuild a completely intangible, and frankly 3rd rate, representation of the world that actually existed somewhere outside of my apartment. My images always contained mountains, sunsets, lakes or oceans, maybe a cabin or a castle, or a four wheel drive or a horse or maybe a dragon and invariably some muscular, masculine fellow all alone in the middle of it.

So I asked myself why I sit here melting in front of a glowing box trying to draw this when the world is full of mountains and sunsets and horses? REAL ones! There may not be dragons, but there's a gym down the road and I could easily conceive of being the incarnation of that guy in my scene.

I shut down the computer and, I can say with all honesty, I never created another 3D scene or bought another 3D model again. Instead I finished college and moved to Colorado.

This is on my mind tonight for a couple of reasons. I talked to a friend on the phone today that I haven't talked to in a long time. We got on the topic of technology and I touched a little on my tendency to shun much of it because it doesn't feel real to me. That said, today I also bought an iPhone and spent a good portion of the day playing with it. It was fun and it's so much more intuitive and useful than any other such device. But I could feel myself becoming absorbed with it, and in the end I asked myself what was I really getting from this device that I wasn't getting previously? Convenience, probably. But I could check my email, make phone calls and calculate tips before I had an iPhone. There was really nothing revolutionary going on here except the way everything was packaged and accessed, and yet I just wanted to be poking around on it. Perhaps it was the novelty, because it wore off pretty quick.

I'm not giving up my iPhone, but I'm not going to be one of those people standing at the bus stop completely engrossed in it either. I don't have the unlimited texting plan and I have the minimum package of minutes. (I can hear several of you gasping.) I just don't use it. It's supposed to be (well, in my mind anyway) a tool for doing what I need to do, NOT a device through which my life is lived. Today's events just got me thinking again about all the pointless distractions we have in our lives. An hour perusing the app store in iTunes will make that pretty clear. Seriously, have you seen that thing?

I'm taking a day off next week to go riding. There's a stable just outside of town with some horses I've been wanting to meet. I won't be taking my iPhone.