August 13, 2021: I posted on Facebook

August 13, 2021: I posted on Facebook. After a long time. You should look at it, it is a lament of a way of life that we are about to lose. I wrote about this life as a theoretical possibility in book chapters in the late 1990s. An idealized cybernetic life. I dreamed about this then, and even earlier. Sitting in a basement with computer consoles. Like in the science fiction movies of the old days. Everything on the screen. Life distilled to the digital. Students on the screen. Bondhus on the screen. WhatsApp as community. Everything a keystroke away. And it became real in March of 2020. I was confined to the hole. First, it was disturbing. But then I saw the screen. And all was good. Multiple screens, multiple places on the screens, multiple people. Tethered to the screen as the music played and I worked. Finished my book. Attended numerous meetings. Conversed on WA with my bondhus. Everyone was always and already there. Now it is about to change. The strains of work in the “real” life is coming back. The thing that I had always wanted, a computer screen and me, is coming to an end. I will be in real spaces soon because my work will have to return to the distant pre-pandemic days, shedding anything we learned on the pandemic way. I shudder. For some like me, Covid showed us a future, which the “system” is about to crush, and drag me back into the real. Take away my freedom of space. Take away my freedom of time. To most of my readers the return is perhaps a good thing. My son will perform again for his audience. My wife will again excel in her experimental research. Many of my colleagues will act, sing, and dance again. I will again be the performer in the proscenium of the classroom. The students in the back of the class, invisible to my blind eye, will again slumber out of the boredom of a class they have to take to fulfil a requirement, masked. I will miss the energy of the faces on the screen, all in the front row, as they would interact with me and each other. I will miss the Webinars which will now be replaced by real life seminars, I will miss the verandah where I could be with my portable machine and actually be doing things. I will miss the freedom from space that the pandemic inadvertently brought to me. In a few days, I will be in rooms with people, real bodies, not digitized faces, as we wait for the axe to fall. I remember the axe well. I saw my bondhu hardly able to move as the organs succumbed to the ravishing by the virus. We are OK now. Now. Just now. Just wait. I saw the beast and I do not want to see it again, but the foolishness of the unmasked and the unvaccinated is feeding the beast the fodder it needs. As I provisionally come out of my hole, I am keeping it prepped to return until the foolish mend their ways and do what is needed to kill the beast. My hole is a place that you can come into any time you want but you can never leave because, “they just can't kill the beast.” Hotel California.