Ad nauseam

Not everything is as it seems on this World Wide Web. Nobody is as they appear to be. Some people seem to have a need to make themselves out to be something greater or bigger than they are, when in fact I am sure they would be just fine if they were themselves. I can understand the occassional embellishment of a story or an authors poetic license, but this is just unmistakably wrong.

I, and many of you fellow readers had befriended "Joel" from Priori Ad Lib, who we read on a regular basis. His words flowed with poetic warmth, and he touched us with his incredible insight into the world around him as he suffered through a recurrence of his Leukemia. I won't drag on about the details, but Joel is in effect no more. In fact "Joel" never was. It seems that he was a figment of someone's imagination and that nearly all the poetry and writings from his site were plagiarised.

Sadly, this was brought to my attention by a very kind soul who had gone to visit "Joel" at the Vancouver General Hospital, which "Joel" had invited him to do. Upon his arrival, he was astonished to find out that "Joel" never existed nor was anyone of his description ever an in or out-patient. Why someone would invite a fellow blogger to meet a fictional individual is beyond me. Did they not see that the final outcome would not be good? It took quite a bit of sleuthing, but it seems even the name and people and stories he seemed to captivate us with, were taken from other people's lives and blogs. Early on in our blogdom relationship, I had a brush of doubt when reading one of apriori adlib's posts, but that may simply be my ego or pride kicking in that I should have known earlier. Though it did surprise myself and others that despite all his "accidents" and cancer that he was formidably upbeat and strong.

I feel a resounding pang of sadness and anger that someone would go to such lengths to manipulate our humanistic need for empathy and sympathy. So many of us could relate to Joel, whether it was a friend, family member or ourselves that had cancer or some disease that affected our lives. I have been ruminating about the purpose of the Blog, and can think of a few:

• maybe he did exist and was being remembered by a family or friend who couldn't let go.

• maybe this was a test, like those reality shows, to see what the human capacity was to feel empathy, care and love.

• maybe it was a lonely individual who needed attention, and did whatever they could at the expense of others to get some semblance of attention.

• maybe the person was simply a pathological liar.

Funny enough, when you look at the definition of A priori ad lib(itum) this is what you get:

A priori means "'From the former' — presupposed, the reverse of a posteriori. Used in mathematics, philosophy and logic to denote something that is known or postulated before a proof has been carried out." (wikepedia)

ad libitum means "'According to one's pleasure' — Latin ad, according to + libitum, past participle of libre, to please. Often used to indicate the liberty to "improvise", "just ramble on"; especially in music, theatrical scripts, etc..." (wikepedia).

Put the 2 together and you get "to postulate and improvise from the Former" (or something close to it. I am not a Latin major, so humour me). After that definition I am more apt to believe that this was an experiment to see how far a lie could go before it was unwound. An attempt to carry out a project to see if people would blindly trust or actually look for empirical data to back up the postulated theory.

In anycase, the site is now defunct and removed, but a fellow blogger who was so incensed by what "Joel" had done, has now posted A priori Adlibs last few blog posts here.

Karma can kinda be a bitch that way.