tmcg

Why does everything have to have a title? THE BLACKOUT OF 2003, the radio kept saying with ominous melodrama, after I bothered to turn it on, an hour into a power outage I'd assumed was local and temporary. We have brief outages fairly frequently, especially in summer; a lot of the time the only indication one happened is that the CD player is on when I know I left it turned off. I checked that my neighbors had no juice either, then turned off the computer and took my work outside; I like to work outside anyway, although usually not that late in the day because it gets too hot and then too buggy. (I found a never-posted post on that, which I'll put up sometime soon.) I worked for an hour, then started to worry about the insulin in the fridge, so I turned on the radio. This followed a common widening-ripple experience: Oh, it's not just a circuit breaker. Oh, it's not just this block. Oh, it's all of New York. Whoa, it's the whole Northeast!

I put the insulin and some ice into a cooler and the cooler in the fridge, then worked until the light died, then cooked the food in the freezer, then walked to the water expecting to say "Neat, no Manhattan skyline!" because I like weirdness but instead found the dark horizon disturbing in a post-9/11 way, then grabbed binocs and a family member and sat on the cool deck stargazing until we got sleepy, whereupon I took to my bed to enjoy the easeful darkness, whereupon I woke not realizing I had fallen asleep, with the ceiling fan cooling me and the fridge humming and that neighbor's glaring backyard security light flooding my window. Insulin cooler still had cubes of ice. Milk wasn't even spoiled.

For us, no biggie. But I was glad the TVs weren't working, because I wouldn't have been able to resist turning on a news channel, and then I'd have had to see the instant BLACKOUT OF 2003 logos, and that would have irritated me.

The world is always trying to narrate itself. That's fine. I just wish it would stop trying to market itself.