Location: Marion VA and Orientation Island

Being away from SL™ can be as disorienting as being in it, when worlds collide.

Outside of Marion, VA, if you drive east toward the Grayson Highlands three-quarters of a mile above your head, you’ll pass a number of single-wides, cabins, and small businesses. More than a few have seen better days.

One house caught my wife’s eye, as we roared up the mountain.

“Oh my God!  He’s been here!”

“Who?”

“Pappy Enoch!”

Pappy, a Grayson County boy who got sucked into the “fake wirld o’ Secund Life” got a reprieve from virtuality last month and was permitted a short “vakashun” to visit his home-folks and still.  Little did I know that he’d be setting up a money-making scheme as soon as he got to the real world again.

I put the Honda into the tightest U-turn it would ever see, outside a test-track.  Then I had to stand in several inches of water, mud oozing over the tops of my hiking boots, to line up this photo.

The curious or foolish can visit the Ask Pappy Web site themselves. In no way do I endorse this.  A rich Pappy Enoch is too much to contemplate.  I don’t want him buying a mansion in Windsor Farms, then putting chickens and goats in the yard “tu keep the grass down around mah Rolls Royce (that wun on the see-ment blocks—I gots to get ‘er runnin’ agin).”

I imagine the backhoe tearing up the rest of the lawn so Pappy can put in “wun o’ them-thar fancified cement ponds, so I kin go a-swimmin’ like a citified boy wood du.”

Then again…maybe that’s just what the real world needs. William Faulkner’s con-man and scoundrel Flem Snopes got a mansion (until his brother, Mink, shot him dead after walking 40+ miles to do the deed).  If old Flem got a big-house, why not Pappy?  And why not in ultra-sedate Windsor Farms?

My God, gentle readers! This is in the great tradition of American literature…Faulkner is the South’s Shakespeare. Maybe Pappy can be it’s Prospero…or Caliban.

I don’t know how many of you have had surreal moments where incidents or avatars in-world began to seep into reality. If you have, let me know and we’ll run that news here.

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts

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