Uncle Rico and the Ghost of Fame

Fame is such a funny thing and relative thing. What percent of the "kick" is that people around you (in your small town or large town) see you in the paper, see what you have done, think you're successful and famous. Of course, "insiders" who are generally NOT FRIENDS know the truth, know the painful limitations of local modest fame. But how much do they matter? And we're not talking dollars (yet).
Dollars would be nice, would be a completely different way the world says Hello. But short of dollars (we're talking trophies and medals and ribbons and nice writeups in the local paper)... what is "fame"? Very odd, I can tell you that. Stories of the (small-time) famous washing up, remembering their moment of glory. Uncle Rico in Napoleon Dynamite... reliving his moment of glory from high school football over and over ad nauseum. That is all of us, that one moment, I coulda been a contender.
In a pagan world we'd be interacting with a rich pantheon of gods. We're talking garden gods, forest gods, neighborhood gods, maybe even city gods. There are beyond that the gods of the mountain, and some vague dieties that created heaven and earth . Lucky for us they're preoccupied with their own petty squabbles. That's it. That's fame. Before writing, there wasn't much beyond the kings who could force us to build their damn pyramids. Maybe that's partly why the pyramids fascinate us so. The ego on display, the massive folly of self-invented importance combined with the mundanity of thier dessicated remains, as pathetic a corpse as any (despite mummification which I admit was something).
So here we are.
I often think about that scene in Minority Report, where Cruise's character wanders through the video simulation salon, everyone hooked up to virtual reality machines that made them a pope or a Hugh Hefner, or a Micheal Jordan equivalent. What would that do to our ambition? I'm not going to work on that (hopeless) novel, I'm gonna go over to the virtual salon and pretend I'm Salman Rushdie for a while, darting through the streets of London escaping Iranian assassins, clutching the only copy of my next bestseller to my breast.