We had a power outage in my neighborhood this afternoon. It only lasted about an hour and a half, but a lot of the local business owners seemed annoyed by it -- that their perishables were going bad, that their cash registers weren't working, that they might have to close during the blackout and lose the already small trickle of midday customers they were lucky enough to have. This is my second outage since I moved here; the first was in the middle of the night and lasted for several hours. I could have just slept that one off, but I ended up pacing my apartment in the darkness, listening to the schizophrenic across the street bellowing out his paranoid delusions and shattering glass. Short-term outages like this are rare in New York City -- we just let it build up until all the circuits overload and then get situations like the '77 citywide blackout, or the one a couple of years ago that apparently started in Ohio and took down the whole northeast power grid.
In today's LA Times there's an article about the heavy power usage that comes with heat waves like the one we're experiencing. The piece suggests we can prevent worst-case scenarios by conserving energy -- and that's something we should be doing anyway, but in weather like this, even the greenest thinkers will be chaining themselves to their air conditioners like Darryl Hannah to a South Central tomato vine. This also comes at a time when our public beaches are too contaminated to swim in, and there's pathetically little honest-to-goodness parkland where people can sit comfortably under shade trees. How are we supposed to turn to nature to keep us cool? My little western-exposure terrace is wonderful in the morning or after the sun has gone down, but it was so impossibly hot yesterday afternoon that I didn't even want to go out there to water the plants.
The greatest moment in TV history was on Married With Children when the Bundys decided they'd had enough of the heat and moved into the freezer aisle of their supermarket. Would that Ralph's actually bothered to keep its food cold...
Comments