Stormy Weather

Two recorded announcements from the police last evening: "All residents in the area are advised to stay indoors...". I was hoping they would say "...because a group of zombies are loose in your town". It would be so much more entertaining to deal with issues like the undead. Instead, the message warned us about how the storm had knocked out several trees and power lines.

We were without power for a whole minute. I have never felt so...powerless. You have not lived through a catastrophe if you haven't looked up at your microwave clock and seen its display go black. Such a stark reminder of mankind's foolish infatuation with LCD. I finally understood what Billie Holiday meant when she sang "life is bare, gloom and misery everywhere".

But with adversity comes strength (or, as in my case, a desire to consume raisins coated with chocolate) and in our darkest hour, we discover new shining facets to ourselves. Yesterday, for example, the wife and I discovered the lost art of conversation in that one moderately dark minute:

"Shit"
"Shit"
"The power's out"
"The power's out?"
"The power's out"
"Shit"

Energized by this interaction, we then walked up to a window and looked at trees and plants staggering under the storm's assault. (They do bend with the rainfall. Never learn botany from a folk duo from New York.) Something about standing at a window during a storm and talking to someone makes me feel like a character in a book. Every word you utter is a symbol, every gesture is loaded with significance and every rain-lashed tree is a metaphor for struggle, loss, love and longing. If only we could add blurbs to the back of our conversations. "Stirring!", "Terrifying", "A minor triumph!" and "We may have found a new Proust!".

The power was soon restored and I continued my eternal online quest to find that one website to keep me entertained forever. That's when it struck me. What our earth needs most is a hybrid of laptop batteries and zombies. So we get batteries that never die.

Epiphanies, memorable conversations, creative solutions to our energy crisis...there's so much to be learned from Nature, if only we kept our eyes and ears open.