Virtual

So, is this what it is now? 

Bike rides are cyclists on trainers pedaling into webcams?  Bars are rows of tiny heads sharing picklebacks online?  Standing around a fire means reclining in your living room while gazing into the warming glow of your computer screen?

Okay, I’ll take it; it’s better than nothing IMHO; IIRC I LOL’ed IRL a lot, so there’s that.

I did get out to pedal a bit, too. 

First, I did a fly-by the usual meet-up spot, making sure to maintain my social distancing, in order to simulate the usual experience.  Having been assured by the expert with the public health degree that riding around on the eerily empty streets had essentially zero probability of increasing my risk factor, I felt relatively confident I wasn’t a bad person for enjoying the opportunity to take all the lanes as I headed home through neighborhoods that looked more like 2:30 in the morning on the way back rather than 7:30 in the evening on the way out.

Then, after an hour or so around the virtual water cooler, becoming increasingly amused by different views and perspectives made possible by the tiny camera eyes, (and increasingly intoxicated by available intoxicants), I rolled out for a little spin around the deserted neighborhood, stopping in a nearby pocket park for a quick smoke just to remind the Universe that we haven’t totally given up; life goes on during the plague even if we’re plagued by doubts and worries.

I guess we can get used to this and I guess we have no choice but to, at least for now. 

And anyway, as philosopher Nick Bostrom’s “simulation hypothesis” contends, we’re all just simulated minds thinking we’re biological ones anyway, so what’s the difference if what’s happening isn’t real; it isn’t real anyway.

Of course, the ancient Vedic rishis knew this, too.  All of it—me, you, bikes, parks—is just Maya; all is Brahman, man, and Tat Tvam Asi.

La-Dee-Da

If you didn’t know it was happening, you wouldn’t know it was happening. 

The trees sure don’t care; they are as pink and beautiful as they are every spring, especially this one.  And if you can ride all over town during the second week of March without your raingear, that’s as swell as it is unusual.

Tonight I learned that some people think that the moon is a titanium sphere, supposedly proven by the claim that when the Apollo 11 astronauts blasted off from our satellite’s surface, they dropped a wrench and it “rang like a bell.”

Also, apparently, the Masons did everything and all of it was good.

It sure seems like these are historically weird times, which is all the more reason, I think, to keep it all in context.  Just because never before have all of society’s systems—health care, banking, government, education, etc.—caved simultaneously, is no reason to think this is unprecedented, even if it is.

Fortunately, it’s easiest enough to maintain the requisite 6-foot “social distance” on a bicycle, which doesn’t account for what happens when you stop pedaling and start standing in the shared firelight with a quartet of youngsters drinking rum and not falling down.

It’s the way we have all acquiesced to the mandates of the moment that is most striking to me. 

The virus in our minds has made way more difference than the virus in people’s bodies, which is why, in part, standing around an increasingly large fire in the out of doors offers such satisfaction.

No one knows precisely what the future holds; one thing we can be relatively sure of, though, is that the bicycle emphasizes its charms when you get to ride in lanes not usually conducive to the charms of bicycling.  We got out in it and that’s plenty.

Perhaps it’s the end of the world as we know it, if so, embracing what we do know is entirely sufficient for now.