Arabian Winter / MYSTERY IN THE ARABIAN DESERT

11 February:

Brrr! It’s really cold. I woke up to the end of winter but hey wait; is it the rain of winter or the first sign of its departing. If winter comes, can spring be far behind (Shelly), but why so f**king chilly – no; it’s frigid.

Last night, I kept the heater on. Whenever I switched it off, I would wake up minutes later with the discomfort of chills despite the two layers of blanket and two layers of winter bedtime clothing.

I used to sleep out in the morning to my heart's content, but that seems ages ago, although, well, a few months ago. My duty hour has been changed. If I used to sleep the winter morn till my back aches (my work begins at noon), I have to; this time, respond to my cell phone alarm with the precision of a trained soldier as if my life depended on it, but c’mon; don’t we all, like obedient servants, respond to our gadgets? We; like it or not are slaves to machines big and small that we create. We become programmed robots while our machines become the command posts that guide our everyday lives, dictating everything from bedtime and wake-up times to lunch and dinner. We used to be real humans with brains that organized our lives – not anymore. We cannot even do simple computations without fishing our gadget from either the inside of our pockets or inside of our drawers. One day, the human brain will atrophy due to misuse. If and when ETs invade planet Earth, all they have to do is disrupt our communications, and Earth will be a planet of the apes: ETs will be intelligent monkeys, and we, humans, will be brainless homo-sapiens.

In the Arabian Peninsula; winter is the best time of the year and despite the cold, love it actually – it’s sad to see it go.

I received this 3-minute video in my email. The people nearby were unbothered by doing whatever it was they were doing at the time. Those driving by just kept on driving, while some people were even enjoying the scenery. This video was obviously taken with a cellular phone. To this day, nobody, not even the government, has had a rational explanation of what caused the desert to geyser sand with tremendous force. If I were there, I would have run as far away as I could. The desert could have exploded like a dormant volcano.