Parody of “The Gentle Arms of Eden”, words and music by
Dave Carter
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Parody lyrics ©2026-09-23 by Bob Kanefsky. All rights reserved. The copyright of the original lyrics and music remain with the holder(s) of the original copyright.
In the summer of 2021, I wrote a three-verse song about the pandemic response in progress. I deliberately did not write the epilogue verse, but ended it with a reference to the 2020-12-31 NYE filk circle (plus a placeholder “From songs about a balrog, an elf mage and a dwarf to ragtag queues of folk and blues” as a place to park the “Enterprise and Worf” line). I appended a note saying “To be continued when we see how the rest of 2021 goes?”. With the covid vaccines developed and tested in record time and finally widely available, I was optimistic that in just months covid would be reduced to the same level of threat as influenza (which after all kills a moderate number of people, e.g. tens of thousands a year in the U.S. annually, in a normal year where society accepts the risk and goes about its business). I thought conventions would resume that year but that some people would want to stay at home until covid was totally eradicated (like smallpox, which was always unlikely to ever happen) or caused zero deaths (like measles in the U.S. until recently). I imagined there would come a time when I would flip my position and want to satirize holdouts as deciding to “stay home and watch a virtual convention” on a screen. But that was the summer that the Delta variant took over, so I could understand caution, and eventually Omicron caused a lot of my non-filk events to be canceled again. And I myself decided to skip the first in-person con that I would normally attend, not because covid itself was all that deadly anymore to the vacinated, but because the hospitals in that state were still overwhelmed and my local ones were not. (I quipped at the time that “I’m not planning to get appendicitis that weekend, but it would be nice to have the option.”) And the next year, I went to cons in person as usual, but the virtual cons continued, and I saw many of the same people attending both. As I write this in 2026, covid has not been a pandemic for three years, and in-person conventions have been running (with some precautions against endemic covid) — and even so, virtual conventions and circles are still going strong too, and many of us avidly attend both. Apparently virtual filk events are something we always wanted, despite drawbacks (see “Lunar Filk Sing” aka “Speed of c”), but we just didn’t know it until we were forced to try it. So now I finally know how to end the song, even if it wasn’t the ending I expected.
In the spring of 2020, when the world became unclean,
There was virus in each speck of spit but no approved vaccine.
So the towers and the fibers
Fought to dull a deadly spike
And the ones who could got pretty good at saying to a mic:
| Chorus: |
I work from home. I also play from home. This is the only base of operations that I own. And while I stay in my dark house alone I’ll be rocking out at virtual conventions |
They replaced one lost convention,
Then the one became a few,
Then the few became a routine thing
Held every week or two.
From far-flung lonesome homesteads,
Each filker joins the fray
And looks about in muted doubt
And shrugs as if to say:
(Chorus)
With Google Docs or numbers,
We learned to stake our claims.
Or first, a queue of hands of blue
And hosts to read out names.
Remember that dark season
While the plague was most severe,
Our wary celebration of good riddance to the year?
(Chorus)
Now we’re back out in the sunlight
Of our G2 yellow dwarf.
Hotels are thronged with fans and songs
Of Enterprise and Worf.
But the techno-tricks we learned then
While containing a disease
Mean fewer flights and hotel nights
And more friends overseas.
| Chorus: |
I work from home. I also play from home. But I no longer need to treat it like a pressure dome. After my stay At hotels when I roam, I come home and join a virtual convention. I love rocking out at virtual conventions. |