It’s Lights Out Time
And I Can’t Stand It
It’s the most wonderful time of the year, the time of power outages that may last only a few seconds, minutes or hours or possibly days or months and maybe years and maybe forever sending us into unending blackness like a plague.
The rain was pouring, the lightning was flashing, the thunder was outrageous as I experienced my first outage of the year last night going into today, when the electricity was on sabbatical from around 6 p.m. to around 9:30 a.m. There was the initial bump when the lights blinked but it returned within a few seconds and I didn’t know for certain but it relatively sure that it was the cruelest calm before the storm, which arrived in the midst of a You Tube video I was watching about the plot to kill Hitler. I knew the ending so it was not that big a deal but it was the visceral loss of the television, the act of observing in a hypnotic state, that was so dreadfully painful and almost incomprehensible loss. I have no idea what caused this latest larceny, it may have been a car crashing into a telephone pole after the driver was texting that he would be home shortly or a lightning strike on a transformer or something even more dire, like a widespread cyber attack on the entire power grid by some diabolical foreign enemy like Texas, threatening all kinds of mayhem, from darkened hospitals to interruptions of other life saving services.
And so the light was gone and the scary, cold and dank darkness had returned, the AC had stopped humming and beads of sweat began to surface on my forehead, my beloved computer screen was black, while the Internet service to my cell phone also had fallen, leaving me no way to read the latest Facebook posts on the “Jail Trump” website or to ponder the observation by astrophysicist and all around genius, Neil deGrasse Tyson, that “If you leave Earth at the age of 15 in a spaceship and spend five years in space, when you get back on Earth you will be 20 years old and all of your friends who were 15 when you left will be 65 years old. This phenomenon is known as ‘Time Dilation’ in physics.”
So I ordered out to Frank’s for a sausage, pepper, Parmesan sandwich with jalapeno peppers and I stopped at Bottle King for two, large, high alcohol IPAs and made the best of a difficult situation. I lit two large battery-powered lanterns that gave a measure of light but made for a pitiful replacement of the electric lighting and I considered lighting candles but thought better because I had no candles.
It was then that I realized that I was a captive of the power grid and that ironically, I was completely powerless to do anything about it although I did get a second hand generator two years ago and have yet to actually use it or even find out if it works. During the roughly 16 hours that I was helpless and impotent, I grew increasingly angry, not at JCP&L, but at myself for having been lulled into the false sense of power security, for believing that someone or something would take care of me, although at the same time I knew all too well that it could be summarily, brutally, mercilessly, savagely, severely, viciously, callously, monstrously, pitilessly, sadistically and unmercifully snatched from me. And it was during these hours of tenebrosity that I made a silent vow that when the power returned, as I prayed it would, that I would be break the chains and become finally independent of all the external crutches that I have grown to know and love.
When the power returned, I felt like I had actually lived the “time dilation” effect and that while I had only aged a day, everyone else was 50 years older. So I turned the AC up to high, jumped on my computer, got up to date on Facebook and all was right again while I played the role of ostrich in the sand.
But I have made it through worse. I remember a few years ago when the hurricane knocked out power for nearly two weeks and how each night I returned home from work and turning on the block leading to my neighborhood I looked with great hope to see if the lights were on and for the longest time, they never were, and the tightness in my chest grew tighter with each night of disappointment.
I hear of third world countries where they have power for only a few minutes each day and I wonder how they can possibly catch up on all the cute pet memes and how they can keep their collective sanity in the face of such abject impecuniousness. Oh the inhumanity. Statistics show that 67 percent of the developing world still goes without household electricity and that the worst service is in South Sudan, where only 5.1 percent of its population enjoying access to electricity and Chad, where only 6.4 percent of its population has access to the energy commodity.
And I do feel lucky that at least I can get WiFi and that is not the case in China, Egypt, Belarus, Cuba, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Sudan, Thailand, Kazakhstan, Iran, Myanmar, Syria, Uzbekistan, the UAE, Ethiopia, Bahrain, The Gambia and some parts of Russia and there are several countries where the internet is regulated and only select people have access.
And when the AC kicked on this morning, I heard the motor start and I felt the cool air blowing on me and I felt a sublime wonderment not very different from a very, very good orgasm.