SoCS photo prompt — 7.31.21

Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is “the last photo you took.” Take the last photo you snapped. What’s the first word that comes to mind when you look at it? That word is your prompt. Enjoy!

Somewhere in my mess from relentless house moving I do have a digital camera from the last century. I have a defunct smart phone (15 years old?), that takes photos, but I have almost no way of accessing them other than to look at them on the phone. It takes bad photos, or I take bad photos with it, or both. In case you’re wondering, my phone is a “delightfully retro” flip phone. It takes and makes phone calls—concept, right?

I do have photos, though. If you’ve followed me long enough you know that I hangout in a virtual world, Second Life, and I take pictures there. I’ve used many of my photos from Second Life to illustrate my blog posts here. Now, we could get into a discussion as to whether these are actually photographs, but we won’t. We really won’t.

The photo shows my avatar sitting on some old, wooden, shipping crates in my houseboat after having just renovated its interior. It had been decorated with normal, traditional furnishings. I got in a mood and wiped the slate clean. It’s a virtual world; I could put things in there that would have you sitting upside down and hanging from the ceiling. I could have things that aren’t known in our “real” world. It could be anything.

I made the walls dark and the floors distressed wood. There is a thin, opalescent, flowing oil slick on the floorboards. Low vines are flattened against the floor in areas, while other plants grow from cracks in the walls, as if the place was an abandoned building. Books are stacked everywhere. There’s an old piano. There are golden dust orbs swirling. There’s a small flock of flying books (that are barely visible in the upper left). There’s a fog bank inside, along with a puff of neon will-o’-wisp. It isn’t just visual, there are sounds of water lapping the boat, the flying books make a flapping sound and their are windchimes. It’s a weirdly dark but calming hybrid of a place.

I’m day drinking in bunny slippers in the gloom and fog of my weird environment; which in some ways mirrors my real life

The word that first came to my mind upon looking at this, and what the actual prompt of this post is to be is: Resignation.

The cause of the virtual blasting of my home space was me feeling at lost ends. As I’ve mentioned previously, many things in my life are difficult right now. I needed psychically to wipe off the year, and I can’t do it as symbolically, effectively or practically in my three-dimensional life as I can in my virtual life. I feel very resigned, to fate, to whatever. Day drinking in bunny slippers, even virtually, pretty well sums it up. There’s very little I have control over in my life; I can reconstruct my Second Life.