Have you got the time? I seem to have lost all of it

Some years ago, my computer instadied. No warnings, no ifs, no buts, no nothing. One moment it worked, the next it didn't.

Pow. Gone. This is an ex-computer. It has ceased to be.

Now, there's never a good timing for this. Whenever it happens, it happens at a bad time. It happening being the major constituent of the badness of the given time.

But the particular time it happened was the week before Christmas, when the prices of just about everything is spiked upwards in anticipation of the guaranteed buyer interest. So buying a new one was out of the question - spending money on Christmas premiums is a luxury I did not have. (Still don't have, as it were - which means that I still don't have anything in the ways of pads, smart phones or anything like that.)

So, what happened was me being offline for a week. No internet, no youtube, no music, no nothing. Just me, the books I had on hand and the twenty degrees of brutal cold that haunted the outside at the time.

Minus twenty degrees (Celsius) is enough lack of heat to visibly freeze any unprotected liquid. Not instantly, but visibly. This might be construed as a random piece of miscellaneous information, until we remember that it severely limits what one can do outdoors. Being being one of the things limited.

So. Me, the books and time to think.

It was an interesting week, to be sure. Suddenly, there was time to do things. Cleaning? Ample time. Cooking good food? Yep. Eating the same food? Yes indeed. Reading? Very much so. Think long and hard about the interconnected virtual reality of contemporary life?

Aye.

I imagine that this might sound strange to some of you younger readers, but I'm considering doing it again. Hopefully without my new computer dying on me.

Remember what I said about being the last of a generation? The last slice of humanity having memories of and from the beforetimes? The times before constant global communications?

It is good to be reminded that these times actually existed. That, in fact, they were the default mode for human being for just about all of history except the last couple of decades.

Though I probably won't be reading the first installment of the Baroque Cycle this time around. There is too much of a good thing, after all. -