Thwarted?!
I had every intention or writing about my visit to the Heinz History Center today. I also planned to prepare for my road trip to Chicago tomorrow morning. Unfortunately events have conspired against me. Instead I'm sitting at a booth at the Brillobox, using a friend's laptop and the bar's WiFi connection. It's not that I'm lazy or a derelict drunk, but rather an act of "god" that has brought me here tonight.
Only a couple of hours ago I thought that I had the luxury of sitting down to one or two episodes of OZ- Season 4, and indeed I was in the midst of a fascinating shift in the narrative arc when my neighborhood got hit with a micro-burst. Sheets of rain were hitting the aluminum siding of the house, and I could hear my empty garbage cans falling down and sliding along the sidewalk. The screen door opened and slammed shut a few times in quick succession and the plastic furniture was scraping along the surface of the front porch. I knew it was a fairly severe storm, but I sunk further into the couch in the coziness of shelter and confidence. And then the power went out.
Just a couple of weeks ago I remember cruising down an inner-city thoroughfare thinking about the poor bastards sitting in the dark of their houses as a result of a rash of summer storms. It's easy to get smugly self-satisfied if you haven't experienced an extended blackout in years. In all the time I've spent in Sharpsburg, I've never been inconvenienced by loss of electricity for any length of time- even when the worst flood in seventy years hit town. So it was with an unpleasant shock of memory that I settled into the rapidly darkening household, wondering when whatever damaged infrastructure would be repaired.
There's not much to do without light. In those conditions, it's not hard to imagine why our forebears were early-risers. No television. No internet. Just sitting in the twilight with a trio of slightly anxious cats. M. went to sleep, but I had things I wanted to get done. It's an effective object lesson in the risks of procrastination. So what do I do now? Getting into my car and looking for food, I noticed that streets a block or two away have electricity. Unless you are a civil engineer, patterns of power loss seem awfully random and arbitrary. Why me? It's another example of American tragedy. Oh my God, what do I do? Meanwhile people are starving in the Sudan. People in Iraq enjoy a couple of unreliable hours of electricity a day. And I have to go to the bar and grab a booth to update my blog.
Actually, I did benefit from my forced change in plans. When I got to the Brillo I caught the tail-end of a reading upstairs. Thad Kellstadt, a talented and amiable artist who is himself migrating to Chicago at the end of the month, was sharing some of his poems. While I own several of his paintings, I had no idea that he wrote. In short bursts of slacker haiku, he delivered the goods. I especially enjoyed a quote from the cult-classic, teenage rebellion movie, Over the Edge- "A kid who tells on another kid is a dead kid."
Don't tell anyone I was bitching about a blackout.
Only a couple of hours ago I thought that I had the luxury of sitting down to one or two episodes of OZ- Season 4, and indeed I was in the midst of a fascinating shift in the narrative arc when my neighborhood got hit with a micro-burst. Sheets of rain were hitting the aluminum siding of the house, and I could hear my empty garbage cans falling down and sliding along the sidewalk. The screen door opened and slammed shut a few times in quick succession and the plastic furniture was scraping along the surface of the front porch. I knew it was a fairly severe storm, but I sunk further into the couch in the coziness of shelter and confidence. And then the power went out.
Just a couple of weeks ago I remember cruising down an inner-city thoroughfare thinking about the poor bastards sitting in the dark of their houses as a result of a rash of summer storms. It's easy to get smugly self-satisfied if you haven't experienced an extended blackout in years. In all the time I've spent in Sharpsburg, I've never been inconvenienced by loss of electricity for any length of time- even when the worst flood in seventy years hit town. So it was with an unpleasant shock of memory that I settled into the rapidly darkening household, wondering when whatever damaged infrastructure would be repaired.
There's not much to do without light. In those conditions, it's not hard to imagine why our forebears were early-risers. No television. No internet. Just sitting in the twilight with a trio of slightly anxious cats. M. went to sleep, but I had things I wanted to get done. It's an effective object lesson in the risks of procrastination. So what do I do now? Getting into my car and looking for food, I noticed that streets a block or two away have electricity. Unless you are a civil engineer, patterns of power loss seem awfully random and arbitrary. Why me? It's another example of American tragedy. Oh my God, what do I do? Meanwhile people are starving in the Sudan. People in Iraq enjoy a couple of unreliable hours of electricity a day. And I have to go to the bar and grab a booth to update my blog.
Actually, I did benefit from my forced change in plans. When I got to the Brillo I caught the tail-end of a reading upstairs. Thad Kellstadt, a talented and amiable artist who is himself migrating to Chicago at the end of the month, was sharing some of his poems. While I own several of his paintings, I had no idea that he wrote. In short bursts of slacker haiku, he delivered the goods. I especially enjoyed a quote from the cult-classic, teenage rebellion movie, Over the Edge- "A kid who tells on another kid is a dead kid."
Don't tell anyone I was bitching about a blackout.
Labels: Anecdote, Apocalypse, Brillobox, Thad Kellstadt
posted by Merge Divide at 10:30 PM
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