I let sorabji.mobi, one of my favorite domains, expire a few months ago. .mobi is a failed top level domain originally intended for use by websites that were designed for mobile devices. That was before seemingly everything was mobile, and before content management systems and templating logic made a separate tld unnecessary for a site to be mobile-ready. But in the early days of .mobi there was an air of a new frontier not unlike the dot com boom of yore. dir.mobi was like the new Yahoo, a seemingly enless portal of links to other .mobi sites, most of them regurgitating the same tired content that had already stuffed the desktop web.
My take on .mobi was not to make sorabji.mobi mobile-ready but to post content to it solely from mobile devices. That is what I did, and that is what I am testing again right now, after I don’t know how many years. I carry a foldable bluetooth keyboard and connect it to my phone, typing out these words on, at present, a desktop screen but later from the Galaxy S9+ I’ve used for about three years.
Postings to the “text” category all come from this setup, and on account of the smaller screen on which the words appear, and the somewhat awkward usage of this little keyboard, I often let typos and obvious grammar gaffes get through. It seems to be in the spirit of things. I found a Plugable brand keyboard in the closet. It seems to work fine, making me question why I quit using it.
I’ve been out and around a lot these days, staying very careful about proximity to other humans, masking up virtually constantly, even as the hazards of my glasses fogging up create very real dangers. I nrearly fell down the stairs at the Queensbridge subway station when the glasses instantly fogged up. It was the damp air wafting up from the subway station that got me, suddenly rendering the stairs in front of me invisible.
If I see evern one selfish prick on a bus or subway not wearing a mask I either change subway cars or exit the bus. I also taker advantage of the relative luxury I have of waiting for the next bus or train if one is too crowded.
To show for it all I got a negative covid test result yesterday. I already had the covid-19 back in April and May, maybe even earlier in March. The CW has been that you can’t get it twice but I never believed that, and lately there is talk of the antibodies lasting only a few months.
The only incident of concern to me these past weeks was when I slashed my finger and, of necessity, suddenly found myself in a enclosed space with 4 men I did not know. These were the guys at the Punjab auto body shop who took care of me like I’d checked in to the Mt. Sinai emergency room. They all wore masks but there was epidermal contact as one of them put a bandage on my finger, and of course there’s an open wound to further create chance for infection or transmission.
No symptoms and over a week later I get the negative test results, so I won’t think about it anymore.
Anyway, just talking to myself here, making sure this little keyboard will work for me and thinking there will be more of this coming. I have no patience for working from home anymore, or rather I have no patience for doing creative work or thinking from here. So I shall seek out open spaces.
My mind of late has been like an ocean. So many thoughts, ideas, potential projects, mostly swallowed by the sheer volume. Drowning in my own ocean.