So I made it through the harrowing blackout…
And I spent half of it in the car or sleeping. Pretty lame, huh? After the 4:15ish outage we hung around and tried to work until reports trickled in that it was the whole city, then the whole seaboard. As usual, some lies were true and some weren’t, but how do you sort when you’re in the middle of that? Its interesting to me to think about the isolation that a major outage of power causes. People were lined up down the block for the payphones. Weird sights.I saw Times Square without any lights on (wher can you ever say that and not be lying?), and much later, the sparsely-lit skyline of Manhattan. You could clearly see who had generators running and who didn’t. A few of the skyscrapers were only a little darker than usual and most were indistinguishable from the night sky.
I can also tell you that the city looks a helluva lot different at night–its hard as shit to navigate with every asshole in NYC driving around with his high beams on. Its like no one has ever seen the dark before. I have to put my vote in for the impracticality fo major metropolitan areas without a working distributed power grid, though. If you were thinking about building one, stop. Cities need power to be useful, Ive learned. Otherwise, you might as well live in the middle of nowhere for all the good the city does you. I did like that everyone was hanging out in bars getting drunk. That was fun. Not that I got to drink much. I was so tired when I got home that I might as well have stayed in the city and slept on the floor of the office.
The trip took 4 hours, including a short 20 block walk and a 2 hour Manhattan Bridge approach. I was in a great mood till I tried to get out of Manhattan, then it all went sour. By the time I got home, though, the novelty of driving on 3rd avenue with no lights (I didn’t stop one time, although I drove real slow) brought me back from irritation. All-in-all, it was a fun time.
Now its time to figure out how to get to work and whether i need to pick up Melody so the two of us can get to work. And its time to shower. And search the back of my drawer for some underwear, cause i haven’t done laundry in forever. I also haven’t updated for real in a long time, but things happen (like blackouts) that get in the way of real life.
And, man, I could use a nap….
