I wonder whether I’ve been doing these morning pages for a year yet? I had this idea of blogging them one year “late,” but to the day, as a deliberate rebuke to the “instant” flavor of blogging, of the internet now. Then I moved completely away from that, and now I’m thinking about it again, but it’s probably already moving past the “anniversary”/start date, and this is just another way to sabotage myself, to keep disappointment at bay. At least, if I know it’s I who disappoints me, there won’t be any surprises. And I know I hate surprises. I associate nothing pleasant with being surprised, a legacy of my effed up childhood.
On the topic of surprises – the kind my mind stays quite equanimous about, though – we had a power outage yesterday afternoon. It was the longest I’ve ever experienced here, just over four hours. I know, people who’ve endured days-long outages will roll their eyes at this, but we live in an urban area and almost never experience power outages at all. If we do, they last minutes, not hours. It was especially weird because the worst of the storm was already long past. There was still some wind, but nothing much. We had power until 1:40p.m., and then, poof!, we didn’t. All of P.-Hill and E.-Street was out. We ate dinner early while there was still some light: leftovers heated on the stove, courtesy of natural gas and matches.
After another hour or so, the power came back on. What a relief. It’s really uncanny (as in unheimlich) how utterly dependent we are on electricity. Lights, appliances (both washing machine and dishwasher were in mid-cycle when the power went out), computers, routers (internet)… W. was fuming because he couldn’t keep working. He had a 2p.m. call-in meeting online. He could have used his phone, but decided to conserve its battery, which was kind of stupid as I have a battery pack and we could at any rate always go to a cafe to recharge. Or a library.
We decided to walk to T. (cafe). As we went down E.-St., we talked to a resident of a house where they always do quite a number for Halloween and where I’ve often seen Wiccan symbols at other times. The man had that goat-like face and facial hair which quite lends itself to that “religion.” Very friendly, twinkly eyes, too. He claimed power was out downtown, but when we walked past the library, we saw lights on, and every business on C.-St. was lit and open.
Meanwhile, back home, we were starting to feel a bit bleak as we finished our early dinner, especially since J. next door, who was texting with her husband who was monitoring the National Grid website, claimed it could take days for the utility to restore power. As daylight began to fail, I wondered where we should go for the evening to get some light and life. Mercifully, the linemen and women got things back up and running, and I don’t think any intersectionality of identity was involved in their success. Priorities.