Gimme a laptop with an extra battery, I'm going underground for a long, long time

I hate watching old movies for one reason: Sitting there, watching the old frames flicker, I get depressed. I start wondering about the actors, and whether they are all dead. I try and work out how old they would be based on their age at the time of filming, and the year of release. Unless there are retirement complexes and frail care centres in Hollywood housing hundreds of 120 year-old movie industry geriatrics, they are all pushing up the daisies in the cemetery there. (Or, being Hollywood, orbiting Earth in cryogenics capsules).

Same with music. Many of the artists I like are dead, although few of them from ‘natural causes’. On bleak days it feels like I’m listening to ghosts, as I hear the emotion in their voices. South Africa has a very low life expectancy about 40 years, and professional musicians probably rival even that. Second thoughts- I shouldn’t say that- it’s very flippant when AIDS is wiping out my fellow South Africans.

So the point of all this, is:

What happens to all of us who live such virtual lives? When we die, our blogs and social networking stops (clearly, it’s difficult to make new friends when you’re a stinkin’ corpse). All those passwords, combinations of pets, middle names and telephone numbers backwards close the door to all the accounts.

A good idea would be to stick ‘em on a piece of paper, and add it to the will, so that someone can post a note saying what happened to you….
Facebook: Jim is: n’t
Twitter: What are you doing? Decomposing
You get the picture. If we lead virtual lives, we need to have a plan in place to deal with virtual deaths, or at least conveying real death to virtual people. This is getting confusing. If you play the game ‘Second Life’, and you really die, then who kills your character off? Maybe that’s why we all have these things: Myspace- we do it to occupy some place that will die after us. I’m sure most of these programs and groups have a way of weeding out inactive accounts eventually, but for a while, you could live on…

For those of you who don’t update your blogs- you should understand the amount of anxiety it causes paranoid people like me- Are you dead? Not that I’m saying blogging is a life and death thing, but would it kill ya to post something? I have visions of blogging friends from over the years who have stopped writing, visions of their skeletal bodies seeping decomposing body fluids into their keyboards. I was quiet for a long time, but no more!

I’m alive!