Lights off everybody's home in Normal entries

The power was out for two days here. Of course, I thought of a thousand slimy things I wanted to talk about, and of course I forgot them all (put your panties back on, I was referencing S.T. Coolidge. Wait, no, he would have wanted your panties off.). I might have bitched a lot about the last two major outages, I think one pre-dated prose box, or my involvement with prosebox, um, participation, though Amy G dragged me in fairly early, so there wasn’t a lot of daylight between those cracks.

The past few days I can’t really blame on the antiquated power grid here, though it wouldn’t happen to a modern grid. It was an unusual act of god or God or gODD depending upon your belief system, or, possibly global warming, depending on your belief system (how do holocaust deniers and global warming deniers spackle in the cracks in time and data? Wax? Resin?) Sustained high winds all day and gusts up to 65 sustaining for several minutes. That would have been hard to anticipate. I mean the weather guys knew it was coming, I just mean it’s atypical for this area and would have been hard to anticipate for the folks who built this power grid during the Eisenhower years. Power outage was the least damaging thing. A school lost a roof while school was in session, trees fell on a few churchs (act of god indeed) cars got blown over, shit like that. That doesn’t happen here unless it’s a tornado. I’ve been in a lot of tornados here, they don’t last all day.

I bitched a lot about the one maybe three maybe four years back. It was just heavy snowfall, you could call it a blizzard if you like, I expect more from my blizzards — it wouldn’t even rank on my top ten. I had two elderly and not to damn portable parents in a sub zero house for nine fucking days. Ok, so day three we got a generator to run the furnace, but still, the board of water and light took nine fucking days to recover from a snow storm in Mid-the-fuck-Michigan where is normally snows four months out of the year. The director was on vacation and got a lot of shit for that. It was bad form but it’s not like he was going to come turn on my lights or the whole board parties when he’s gone. Sort of like Bush, FEMA and Katrina only less devastating. Bush was on vacation, but, FEMA doesn’t need the sitting presidents blessing to proceed with a disaster on American soil. What bugged me was more folks bitching about dude vacationing than about a power grid that goes down with a fairly standard snow storm.

I guess while I’m bitching — Board of Water and Light sounds like a collaboration between Orwell and Tolkien. Seriously; ominous and middle-earthy at the same time. They say it’s supposed to be — shit, I forgot the word, like a co-op, owned by the consumers — but it sure sounds more like Big brother than partner. I guess it’s just a name, utilities usually have … utilitarian names. They grabbed utility workers from Illinois, Indiana and Ohio to help. It’s my feeling that they should do a power triage and start with homes with infants and then homes with the elderly. This is not a big town, it doesn’t take much research to figure out who lives where and shit for no apparent benefit to the citizens a census is taken every few years, you’d think the municipality would be privy to such things and actually use it for something. During the nine day outage I could not get a live person on the fucking phone. I was able to get an App for outages, but my folks don’t even have cell phones (well, my deceased father doesn’t need, but he didn’t know how one worked even before he was deceased or demented). I’m willing to bet most infants don’t either. Ok, one expects an infant to have a caretaker of some sort, not necessarily the elderly. Being old isn’t a crime or a punishment (well, let’s leave gODD out of this, the state shouldn’t make it a crime or a punishment. A tax paying senior should expect power, a compassionate municipality should return their power first or after the babies power.).

Shit, it’s hours later. Stuff came up, like, for instance, that Tuna grinder was not going to eat itself, or order itself or conceive of it’s ordering and conception on the fly while other stuff came up. Stuff is easier to say, you have your own association with tuna grinders and it’s got different connotations than “stuff” in most context’s a Tuna grinder isn’t “stuff” at all. It’s lunch or dinner or otherwise premeditated. I could be wrong about you; it’s that way for me though. There is no whim, no coincidence, no impulse to a Tuna Grinder. It’s Tuna of forethought, tuna in the first degree, and it is outside of time; your salivary glands weep for grinders past in anticipation of the tuna present and the future tuna. In the right context you’ve been known to howl at the moon or shout “fuck the Dolphins” — again, I might be wrong about you, but … You might not even like tuna or might be on the fence about tuna grinders, anorexic or a gourmand or both with a dash of bulimia (though recycled tuna is … not happy). In this instance for you, vicariously through my power outage then negligence, a Tuna Grinder slides nicely into “Stuff”’s parking space.

Up the street from my old shack in felony flats, unincorporated Clackamas township on the flat heel of Portland Oregon, there was this store called stuff. When everyone was much younger or not yet born, dude set-up a store front of Stuff. In the early years it looked like the tail end of a garage sale; rusty tools in a bucket, well loved dot-matrix printers and yellowed dot matrix paper feed, dulled yard tools, used locks and camera equipment, high end, fancy ass, camera equipment. I used to hang out and talk to the owner, frustrated with my own memory as I should remember the guys name. We were friends, sort of, much closer to friends than enemies certainly. Eventually the store got more ambitious, a for instance would be the rusty tools were no longer in a bin, they were cleaned up, shelved and priced. But, too, computers, game consoles, speakers, guitars, violins, saxophones — nice stuff priced a bit higher than, say, a pawn shop. You wanted me to type Sax and Violins; I don’t have to do what you say.

I found out years later at the sweetwater café that he was a professional amateur soft core photographer. He did artsy nudie shots for discerning … naked people. It came as a surprise but not as a shock. Fuck. I was going somewhere with that … I don’t know, I’m going to post this nonsense before more stuff comes up or more tuna or less power.