Like a shadow in your mind… there’s always been that feeling that something was just a little off with this small pocket universe you’re living in across the pond. Life in Dublin feels like a bubble of your life in D.C., everything is just a little different… a little stranger. It feels often like someone is trying to recreate how you think life should be here, and they took a few shortcuts to keep things simple. So you dwell a bit on simulation theory, and the idea that someone has programmed this whole thing for your benefit.
In fact, simulacra would be a more accurate depiction, because this feels less like a simulation of real-life events, and more like a copied depiction of things that don’t really exist. Like the Truman Show or the Matrix, or a game of SIMs, you find yourself looking deeper down the rabbit hole and finding more and more emerging themes too common not to force some question about your new reality. Here’s just a few that come to mind:
The Cinematography – There’s drab design in the corporate buildings all around your neighborhood, lego blocks and glass panes, stacked up in a hurry during the big tech boom here on Grand Canal. The stark Irish haziness muddles everything into a soft hue and blurred edges. It’s like you’ve turned your T.V. tinting down into a green, less saturated picture. Maybe it’s just the constant cloud cover, but even on those cloud-breaking sunny days, it feels like a short term burst of programmable happiness, coded, not spontaneous. Perhaps it’s a coincidence that when you travel back to the States, it’s usually for summer or to Florida, but you are overwhelmed in those moments with the contrasting vibrant burst of saturated color. And it makes you wonder what worlds you just traveled between.
The Multiverse – it can probably be attributed to culture shock, but there’s just something about living in Europe that makes you feel like you’ve branched over to some parallel world. The world as you know it is familiar, but just a little different. The signs are different colors and shapes, the cash in your wallet is too. The grocery stores are logically in order, but still disorientating. The people speak English but it’s not the same, like you’re in a different time period – different accents, different slang and different contextual jokes. Hell they even drive on a mirror side of the road, how glitchy is that?! This is either a quantum leap, I’ve made somewhere else in space and time or some attempt to reprogram a different model reality.
Programmed routines – the routines and behaviours are so clockwork and predictable, it feels like someone wrote a lazy algorithm to keep it simple. Unlike the US, you don’t see busyness all around you, random traffic jams, and frantic pedestrians criss crossing the sidewalks. You see them on their scheduled routes, cars and people only during commuter hours, and then this business district completely empties out into a ghost town on the weekends. It dawns on you hauntingly, looking down from your highrise office or apartment, the sparse peppering of tiny sidewalkers feeling like automotons or video game NPC’s. And you often wonder when you walk out from your neighborhood into citycentre, are new actors being rushed out onto empty streets? Does the map render as you walk? Do the characters?
The Island – this small ecosphere of Ireland that has become your entire world for months at a time, has managed parameters with tight corners and hard boundaries. Could it be a holodeck on a space station or an alien ship? Could it be a bubble studio set scripted and cast for you alone as the protagonist? Could it be a virtual world you’re plugged into and immersed in, disembodied and fully deceived? The realisation here is that this landscape, this island, would make for a very simple and manageable MMORPG. You’re surrounded by a map that requires very little maintenance. You can’t really drive endlessly in one direction, you haven’t tried to sail across the channel. And any trips you’ve taken off of Ireland have been well planned to the same airport, that portal that usually involves extensive screening, some numbing agent cocktails, and often a nap. One wonders, are you really flying out of Ireland, or is it some other data exchange?
The Relativity – space and time just feel different when you come back to America. Some of it is explainable, like the jet lag from time zones, etc. Some of it is more bizarre, like how you always run at a much higher pace, minutes per mile, in the States, setting new personal bests with lower effort. It’s almost as if your programmers (aka, machine overlords) couldn’t quite write the equivalent code for space time here in Ireland. You find yourself in touch with friends at a 5 to 8 hour time difference, and they’re always experiencing a different part of the day. You have no concrete proof that you’re not just calling them from inside a pocket universe that has no time at all, being allowed to connect with the real world in order to maintain the charade.
And so… you sit and you linger on the probabilities. The unknowable truths. You ruminate a minute more and you draw what conclusions you can. What could they be? What can you say for sure? Well, those you should keep to yourself, those you should not say out loud. For you never can quite be sure who or what is here listening. Notice it, sure. Dwell on it, ok, but not for too long. Question it, never. Because, let us all agree… the Guinness here, in this reality, is far too delicious, and there’s always a few women in red dresses fluttering about.
Paul Carreo 