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Unplugged
by Timothy P. Holmberg
3:35pm – I slid the stubby brass key in and began my ritual jiggling of the lock to my post office box. Though it had never worked well, it had been getting progressively more stubborn. I continued my intercourse with the lock until the errant tumbler in the fourth cylinder of the lock finally acquiesced. I reached my fingers into the box with all the gingerness of a proctologist examining a prostitute. I taunted myself for being the John to a 4" x 5" box. All bills, and invitations to more bills - and me with no income. "Even prostitutes do not have it this easy," I thought as I closed the door.
Blong – went my iPhone, as if to remind me I was also John to a 2 1/3" x 4 ½" box that charged many times what the other one did. The iPhone was a svelte and sultry dominatrix compared its compliant, albeit stubborn, cohort. While the post office box would wait quietly for our brief trysts, the iPhone's Blongs and Marimbas demanded almost immediate tending. "Well, at least the touch screen was easier to unlock," I mused.
Faced with mail on two fronts, I decided to take the analog mail first:
The Navy exchange wanted me to know they were having a Glam-O-Rama sale (whatever that is) – trash.
Navy Federal Credit Union wanted me to know that my account was overdrawn – nothing I can do there, sorry.
Bill for medical services – story there, but will have to forward it to the Veteran's Administration, and they can deal with it . . .
The lights blinked out, and with them the steady hum of the A/C I had been enjoying faded to a halt. Silence settled over the building. "Huh," I muttered to myself, "as if there's not enough crap going on." I collected my unwanted mail and headed out the door. I reflected for a moment on the fact that the door handle, being mechanical, still worked. So much of our lives had come to depend on being plugged into something. Even some toilets couldn't flush without electricity.
As I walked out, the cute young guy with the mo-hawk emerged from the bagel shop.
"Hey, Jeff!" he shouted to an unseen figure upstairs, "your power out?"
"Ya!" a voice shouted back.
The young man turned back to the shop with an explosive "Mother F*" - he stopped himself short of the full expletive realizing that customers were watching.
I walked to the front of the postal store to get one last piece of unwanted mail. This unwanted mail was more important than the other unwanted mail, and thus required a signature. I quipped to the lady behind the counter, "You should turn on some lights in here." She peaked her eyebrows, and breaking into a half smile replied, "But we like the dark. It's so much easier to work in." She handed me my unwanted mail:
The Marine Corps wanted me to know that since I had not paid an erroneous balance on my government issued charge card, I could no longer participate in the reserves – "An automated response from computers that now lay idle," I thought, "if only a human had checked, they could have seen that I was no longer with the Marine Corps." I placed it with the rest of the unwanteds and headed out the darkened doorway.
Halfway across the parking lot and headed to the grocery, I caught myself –
"Wait a minute, I can't get groceries," I explained to the hot afternoon air. The grocery store sat idle with customers trickling from its pried open doors. Their faces had the look of someone who had been stopped just short of sexual climax; unfulfilled, empty handed and frustrated at their grocer's impotence, they wandered listlessly to their baking cars.
I texted the Boy Friend and then realized, "The phones are still working?"
Battery backups on the towers were still allowing our most vital piece of techno to work, I surmised. The BF had gone to the gym and, naturally, I assumed he would be leaving their darkened doorway, similarly unfulfilled and angst ridden. "Perhaps I could help him with that," I wryly thought.
Alas, his tread mill did not require electricity, and the gym was continuing unabated." Weights only need gravity," I observed, "and lord knows no blackout will deter the gays from their gym time." An interesting modification of the Postman's Motto came to mind.
I hopped into my car and headed to our apartment. Intersections were now dark, and the synthesized regularity of them had given way to a halting, improvised jazz. I embraced it because it caused us to cooperate and consider each other. It made us reach our consciousness outside our car and surrender the absolute order of signal lights to one we weaved on the fly. Cars crossed paths like threads tracing the warp and weft of a weaver's loom.
4:01pm – I sat in the sweltering apartment regarding my iPhone. The reception was clearly fading – at two bars, my dominatrix lost her whip, at one bar, her riding crop hit the floor.
I reasoned that the cell towers with the weakest batteries were relenting under the load of our building desperation. My BF's roommate, also an AT&T customer, confirmed my hypothesis. After exchanging a few digs at our phone company, we both started to ponder what it meant to be disconnected from the Matrix. BF's roommate seemed increasingly anxious at the realization that it would be some time before our lives could be plugged back in.
My BF ascended the stairs to the apartment and gleefully informed us that his phone carrier, Virgin, was fully functional and he was still safely nestled in the Matrix.
He proceeded to dispatch various texts and review Facebook status updates. Soon, however, it dawned on him that although he was still plugged in, the Matrix' streets were suddenly barren. All the other avatars had dissolved into digital puddles and drained through the cracks between 0 and 1. I marveled at the thought of thousands of Facebookers having their cyber umbilical cords severed by a circuit breaker somewhere in Arizona. I imagined a collective cry of anguish as the real world smacked them on their buttocks and welcomed them back.
Although I too had a Facebook avatar, I was far less engaged with him. I took a certain glee in knowing that I would not be getting updates about so-and-so picking their nose, or needing some cyber attention. BF was clearly annoyed at my glee, but the heat dampened his enthusiasm for a rousing mock trial debate.
5:30pm – The sun had descended to the point that the oppressive heat was rapidly abating. I suddenly sat up and suggested to the BF that we go out and explore this strange "new" unplugged world of ours. A quick glance at his phone reaffirmed that cyber-land was still a blinking cursor, and so he shrugged his acquiescence.
Underneath his shrug was an ever so subtle curiosity at my proposition. The sun was now a deepening shade of amber as it floated just above the roof lines. We made our way down to the Washington Street intersection, which was still struggling to find its rhythm. The BF did not share my taste for jazz, and I could plainly see the downside of being struck by the stray note of a miss-timed turn. So we headed to the foot bridge that crossed over Washington.
As we made our way towards the bridge, I noted that the sidewalks were populated with neighbors who were now getting reacquainted and dogs who were the unwitting beneficiaries of the blackout. "Ya, ya" my BF nodded, "I see it to." My grin sharpened. We strode the length of the bridge which now had dozens more feet traversing its span than was normal at this time. I patted the hand rail of the bridge as if congratulating it on its sudden popularity.
We rounded the corner into the nearly deserted shopping center. I wanted to see if Starbucks had succumbed to the blackout. A quick pull at the door handle confirmed the idling of the omnipresent giant. But as we walked to the coffee shop patio, I was amazed to find the crowd of usuals sitting at their tables. Some were chit-chatting, others just sat there staring at their empty table. I half expected to see them lifting curled empty hands towards coffee starved lips.
5:40pm – We made a hard right onto University Avenue. The sidewalks were bustling with people who all had the same idea. Without Facebook or texts or any other technological overseer, we all collectively and subconsciously came to the same place. As if in the absence of the electrical din, a Pied Piper could now be heard calling us to the town square. The ghosts were now pouring out of the machine they had made.
As we reverted to our analog selves, my BF and I now found our rhythm and quickly danced between the notes of jazz at the intersections.
Friend after friend greeted us as we exchanged our status updates in person. Each was now bracketed with a hug of human to human realism.
6:01pm – Sirens had been screaming like a banshee, breaking the silence with an almost mechanical regularity. As much as I wanted to revel in my glee, I realized that it was not just Facebook umbilicals that had been severed when the breakers tripped. Hundreds of lifelines now hung dangling. Ambulances rushed against the stopped clocks to collect those whose power cords thirsted for life-giving electricity.
The dark side of the blackout was apparent as restaurants and stores began tossing out food that was rising in temperature to meet the outside heat. The stress was visible on a shop keeper's face as she turned the key to lock her darkened store. So many shops had already shuddered over the last year as the lights of our economy had dimmed. I wondered how many locks would remain closed after the blackout.
6:35pm – Seven hugs and eight blocks later, we happened across one of the local gay bars. Dance music pumped in the background, lights were on, credit cards were flying – but? what? I quickly noticed the Mercedes with windows rolled down parked out front was providing the thumpa thump. The generator out back kept the lights on. They faded in and out in time with the generator's occasional stumbles. The Postman's Motto drifted back into my head. I marveled with mixed emotions at how packed the bar was. "We gays, we're a resilient lot really," I thought.
Facing an adverse society will do that . . .
But at the same time, I felt dismayed that so many of us would take refuge in a bar. It smacked of the escapism that I'd hoped the blackout would usher us to shed. I reeled myself back from the absurd dimensions of my idealism – "Everyone is entitled to choose their own campfire and lord knows tequila will make it burn a bit brighter," I allowed.
7:02pm – At the corner of the Bank of America branch sat a street bum. By the looks of him, I could tell that the sun and the streets had seasoned him for some time now. He’d laid out a plaid blanket and reclined on his weathered duffle. The BF was the eternal Florence Nightingale, always offering to buy food or offer spare change to anyone who was in need. He deposited a dollar in the man’s outstretched mug and immediately wound into a pirouette. He spun like a spinning lotus firework on the fourth of July until the spark of helping someone in need dissipated. The street bum parted his lips in a weak but determined smile, and revealed the price the streets had extracted from his mouth. The teeth that remained in his mouth were like the columns of the Parthenon that refused to relent no matter the burdens cast upon them.
The blackout had blown him a cheerful windfall of people with cash and little else to spend it on. But the blackout had also brought us all a step closer to street bums ourselves. It had silently narrowed the gulf that separated us from this man at the bank corner. Perhaps the donations were our bribe that we paid him should the gulf narrow further and the blackout continue. Perhaps he would share with us the secret to an existence without ‘things’.
As we stepped to cross the driveway, a new Mercedes Benz rolled in front of us with an urgency that would have flattened us had we persisted in our right-of-way. The Benz vaulted into the first parking slot with the precision of a gymnast sticking a 10 point landing. As the door swung open a woman clutching an expensive looking hand bag made for the idle ATM. She perched her sunglasses on her coiffure and furrowed through her purse as her heels grazed the uneven pavement.
The BF and I stopped to see how long it would take before the unavoidable realization. As her would-be road kill, we figured the passive revenge of the moment would suffice once she realized her predicament had an audience. Now five paces from a darkened bank of useless ATM’s, the woman came to halt. The hand that held her wallet lilted like the petal of a water-starved Iris. The woman and the bum had traded places in an instant. She was cashless and desperate, and he was flushed with dollar bills and without a care.
7:36pm – We had now made it through the length of Hillcrest. The BF and I were now masters of the street intersection jazz. The sun had dipped into the ocean, extinguishing the last of its heat and a strange darkness now masked the bustling sidewalks. Head lights and tail lights gave us fleeting glimpses of our fellow revelers. Several resourceful restaurants were full of silhouetted faces and shadowy waiters gingerly navigating the half-light of candle lit tables.
I turned back to see the sight of the street flowing like a moat of headlights bounded by darkened castle walls.
The moon charged to the center of the night sky stage like a soloist in a spot light. With the city lights now hushed into darkness, the moon's light echoed across the sky almost unchallenged save for the chorus sung by the emerging choir of stars. And what a choir.
We were joined in our journey by a neighbor friend who revealed he was an amateur astronomer. He served as our aficionado at tonight's starlight opera. Cassiopeia and Orion took the place of Maria Callas and Luciano Pavarotti. He weaved a tapestry in the night sky that left our eyes wide in wonderment of what true darkness had revealed.
I lamented the presence of the moon – how it denied children tonight of the sight I had known as a child. To see our place in the galaxy with our own eyes. The giant Milky Way accretion disk laid out before us, glowing with a subtlety that no LED screen could duplicate. It was a perspective no amount of electricity or technology could give us, but rather one that electricity had robbed.
8:22pm – We retraced our steps back towards our apartment, wading through crowds of blackout orphans. "That was us, orphaned from our technology," I proclaimed, "Blackout Orphans!" The BF liked the analogy, but quickly urged me on lest I get too eloquent with it. We weaved back through the abandoned shopping center. Its blackened windows reflected the moon's amplified light.
When we rounded the corner, I was the first to detect the faint pleading sound of violin strings. Through the silence of the blackout, the notes danced off the stucco walls. I drew us to the source like a magnet. There in a darkened arch, was a lone fiddler. Such a sweet song poured from his instrument. The melody trickled down his leg to his tapping feet below, like fine scotch whiskey being poured over ice. We joined the audience of fellow orphans and soaked up the sound with our darkness heightened senses.
As his bow drew the last note from his fiddle, we clapped our appreciation. Above us, from darkened windows, applause and whistles joined ours. I looked up from our orchestra seats, towards the box seats above to glimpse our fellow admirers. In a darkened window, I could see a woman flickering her flashlight towards another window. I looked across to see where she was shining her light. There, in the opposite window was the dimly lit smiling face of a little girl. Herself clad with a flashlight, she returned the secret code. Two strangers united by a thin strand of flickering light in the darkness. A shrill motherly voice shouted, "Don't waste that light!" And with that, the little girl's light winked out. The thin strand was broken. I smiled at their chance encounter.
9:23pm – Back at our pitch black apartment, we invited our neighbor to bring whatever snacks and refrigerated items he did not want to see spoil for a late dinner party. While he went off to rummage in the darkness, we went to the task of pushing back the darkness in our apartment. Soon the apartment took on the flickering glow of a Catholic prayer station. The BF went off to round up another orphan from down the street.
Now four strong, we reconvened in our impromptu homage to St. Lucia, the Lutheran patron saint of light. In the midst of our hasty feast, we placed our disaster radio and listened as authorities described how they would reconnect our recently severed umbilicals. A ting of regret swept through me as I realized the electric dawn was approaching. Sweeping from the fringes of our cities, into their dense cores, soon the artificial light would dissolve our feast. Soon we would retreat back into our devises and be absorbed into our TV screens . . . the lights blinked on and a chorus of cheers erupted.
The moon receded as the house lights came up . . . ah, but what a show it was.
Blong – my dominatrix cracked her techno whip as if to remind me who was boss. Doodle da deep, Doodle da deep, Doodle da deep, she continued, as five-hour-old-old texts snapped from her riding crop. I stepped back from my iPhone's spontaneous orgasm and looked at my fellow orphans. "Ya know, that was fun," I offered, "Maybe we should unplug ourselves on our own sometime?" As tantalizing as my suggestion was, I could see by the looks on their faces, I had gotten a bit too bohemian for them.
We said our goodbyes as we each blew out the candles. I silently bade farewell to St. Lucia as I blew out mine. According to legend, she had torn out her eyes and given them to her persistent suitor who admired them so, proclaiming, "Now let me live to God!" She had cast herself into permanent darkness in order to better see what gave meaning to her life.
I turned off my iPhone, picked up a pen and began to write....
Cast of Characters (in order of appearance):
Narrator - Tim
Bagel Boy - Jeff
Postal Counter Clerk - Lisa
BF's Roommate - Rich
BF - Eric
Street Bum - St. Anthony (patron Saint of lost souls)
Mercedes Woman - (Mrs.) Zaccheaus (Book of Luke)
Half Moon - Self
Neighbor - Dennis
Fiddler - John
Woman With Flashlight - Michelle
Little Girl With Flashlight - Rachel
Black Out Orphan (dinner guest) - (Big) Eric
Sta. Lucia - Herself
Author's Notes:
On September 9, 2011, Southern California, parts of Tijuana and Arizona experienced a blackout that lasted over eight hours. When the blackout occurred, I realized that this would be a rare opportunity to observe and document what it meant for us, as a technologically dependent society to adapt to the sudden loss of things that had become so basic to all of us. Would we fall apart, or come closer together? Would we spend the hours lamenting being cut off, or would we see subtle things that we had lost without noticing? I dialed my senses to 'high' and began mentally documenting the journey that unfolded.
I was influenced in this writing by Renaissance art I had been studying. I decided to write each moment as an illuminator would illuminate the letters in a manuscript. I would create my own 'book of hours', with all the vivid colors and rich hues that were common in that period.
Technology in many respects has become its own religion. There is no arguing that some of the affect of technology's permeation into our lives has been a greater interconnectedness than any generation has ever seen, but it has also imparted human isolation – we have cloistered ourselves in our own creations. I examined this phenomenon through the lens of both sexuality and religion, because I feel they represent our effort to remain connected to each other and the world around us. I began to hunt for all our lost pennies. Things we may never have realized were lost until suddenly and without notice, our technology was ripped from us like Sta. Lucia's eyes.
3:35pm – I slid the stubby brass key in and began my ritual jiggling of the lock to my post office box. Though it had never worked well, it had been getting progressively more stubborn. I continued my intercourse with the lock until the errant tumbler in the fourth cylinder of the lock finally acquiesced. I reached my fingers into the box with all the gingerness of a proctologist examining a prostitute. I taunted myself for being the John to a 4" x 5" box. All bills, and invitations to more bills - and me with no income. "Even prostitutes do not have it this easy," I thought as I closed the door.
Blong – went my iPhone, as if to remind me I was also John to a 2 1/3" x 4 ½" box that charged many times what the other one did. The iPhone was a svelte and sultry dominatrix compared its compliant, albeit stubborn, cohort. While the post office box would wait quietly for our brief trysts, the iPhone's Blongs and Marimbas demanded almost immediate tending. "Well, at least the touch screen was easier to unlock," I mused.
Faced with mail on two fronts, I decided to take the analog mail first:
The Navy exchange wanted me to know they were having a Glam-O-Rama sale (whatever that is) – trash.
Navy Federal Credit Union wanted me to know that my account was overdrawn – nothing I can do there, sorry.
Bill for medical services – story there, but will have to forward it to the Veteran's Administration, and they can deal with it . . .
The lights blinked out, and with them the steady hum of the A/C I had been enjoying faded to a halt. Silence settled over the building. "Huh," I muttered to myself, "as if there's not enough crap going on." I collected my unwanted mail and headed out the door. I reflected for a moment on the fact that the door handle, being mechanical, still worked. So much of our lives had come to depend on being plugged into something. Even some toilets couldn't flush without electricity.
As I walked out, the cute young guy with the mo-hawk emerged from the bagel shop.
"Hey, Jeff!" he shouted to an unseen figure upstairs, "your power out?"
"Ya!" a voice shouted back.
The young man turned back to the shop with an explosive "Mother F*" - he stopped himself short of the full expletive realizing that customers were watching.
I walked to the front of the postal store to get one last piece of unwanted mail. This unwanted mail was more important than the other unwanted mail, and thus required a signature. I quipped to the lady behind the counter, "You should turn on some lights in here." She peaked her eyebrows, and breaking into a half smile replied, "But we like the dark. It's so much easier to work in." She handed me my unwanted mail:
The Marine Corps wanted me to know that since I had not paid an erroneous balance on my government issued charge card, I could no longer participate in the reserves – "An automated response from computers that now lay idle," I thought, "if only a human had checked, they could have seen that I was no longer with the Marine Corps." I placed it with the rest of the unwanteds and headed out the darkened doorway.
Halfway across the parking lot and headed to the grocery, I caught myself –
"Wait a minute, I can't get groceries," I explained to the hot afternoon air. The grocery store sat idle with customers trickling from its pried open doors. Their faces had the look of someone who had been stopped just short of sexual climax; unfulfilled, empty handed and frustrated at their grocer's impotence, they wandered listlessly to their baking cars.
I texted the Boy Friend and then realized, "The phones are still working?"
Battery backups on the towers were still allowing our most vital piece of techno to work, I surmised. The BF had gone to the gym and, naturally, I assumed he would be leaving their darkened doorway, similarly unfulfilled and angst ridden. "Perhaps I could help him with that," I wryly thought.
Alas, his tread mill did not require electricity, and the gym was continuing unabated." Weights only need gravity," I observed, "and lord knows no blackout will deter the gays from their gym time." An interesting modification of the Postman's Motto came to mind.
I hopped into my car and headed to our apartment. Intersections were now dark, and the synthesized regularity of them had given way to a halting, improvised jazz. I embraced it because it caused us to cooperate and consider each other. It made us reach our consciousness outside our car and surrender the absolute order of signal lights to one we weaved on the fly. Cars crossed paths like threads tracing the warp and weft of a weaver's loom.
4:01pm – I sat in the sweltering apartment regarding my iPhone. The reception was clearly fading – at two bars, my dominatrix lost her whip, at one bar, her riding crop hit the floor.
I reasoned that the cell towers with the weakest batteries were relenting under the load of our building desperation. My BF's roommate, also an AT&T customer, confirmed my hypothesis. After exchanging a few digs at our phone company, we both started to ponder what it meant to be disconnected from the Matrix. BF's roommate seemed increasingly anxious at the realization that it would be some time before our lives could be plugged back in.
My BF ascended the stairs to the apartment and gleefully informed us that his phone carrier, Virgin, was fully functional and he was still safely nestled in the Matrix.
He proceeded to dispatch various texts and review Facebook status updates. Soon, however, it dawned on him that although he was still plugged in, the Matrix' streets were suddenly barren. All the other avatars had dissolved into digital puddles and drained through the cracks between 0 and 1. I marveled at the thought of thousands of Facebookers having their cyber umbilical cords severed by a circuit breaker somewhere in Arizona. I imagined a collective cry of anguish as the real world smacked them on their buttocks and welcomed them back.
Although I too had a Facebook avatar, I was far less engaged with him. I took a certain glee in knowing that I would not be getting updates about so-and-so picking their nose, or needing some cyber attention. BF was clearly annoyed at my glee, but the heat dampened his enthusiasm for a rousing mock trial debate.
5:30pm – The sun had descended to the point that the oppressive heat was rapidly abating. I suddenly sat up and suggested to the BF that we go out and explore this strange "new" unplugged world of ours. A quick glance at his phone reaffirmed that cyber-land was still a blinking cursor, and so he shrugged his acquiescence.
Underneath his shrug was an ever so subtle curiosity at my proposition. The sun was now a deepening shade of amber as it floated just above the roof lines. We made our way down to the Washington Street intersection, which was still struggling to find its rhythm. The BF did not share my taste for jazz, and I could plainly see the downside of being struck by the stray note of a miss-timed turn. So we headed to the foot bridge that crossed over Washington.
As we made our way towards the bridge, I noted that the sidewalks were populated with neighbors who were now getting reacquainted and dogs who were the unwitting beneficiaries of the blackout. "Ya, ya" my BF nodded, "I see it to." My grin sharpened. We strode the length of the bridge which now had dozens more feet traversing its span than was normal at this time. I patted the hand rail of the bridge as if congratulating it on its sudden popularity.
We rounded the corner into the nearly deserted shopping center. I wanted to see if Starbucks had succumbed to the blackout. A quick pull at the door handle confirmed the idling of the omnipresent giant. But as we walked to the coffee shop patio, I was amazed to find the crowd of usuals sitting at their tables. Some were chit-chatting, others just sat there staring at their empty table. I half expected to see them lifting curled empty hands towards coffee starved lips.
5:40pm – We made a hard right onto University Avenue. The sidewalks were bustling with people who all had the same idea. Without Facebook or texts or any other technological overseer, we all collectively and subconsciously came to the same place. As if in the absence of the electrical din, a Pied Piper could now be heard calling us to the town square. The ghosts were now pouring out of the machine they had made.
As we reverted to our analog selves, my BF and I now found our rhythm and quickly danced between the notes of jazz at the intersections.
Friend after friend greeted us as we exchanged our status updates in person. Each was now bracketed with a hug of human to human realism.
6:01pm – Sirens had been screaming like a banshee, breaking the silence with an almost mechanical regularity. As much as I wanted to revel in my glee, I realized that it was not just Facebook umbilicals that had been severed when the breakers tripped. Hundreds of lifelines now hung dangling. Ambulances rushed against the stopped clocks to collect those whose power cords thirsted for life-giving electricity.
The dark side of the blackout was apparent as restaurants and stores began tossing out food that was rising in temperature to meet the outside heat. The stress was visible on a shop keeper's face as she turned the key to lock her darkened store. So many shops had already shuddered over the last year as the lights of our economy had dimmed. I wondered how many locks would remain closed after the blackout.
6:35pm – Seven hugs and eight blocks later, we happened across one of the local gay bars. Dance music pumped in the background, lights were on, credit cards were flying – but? what? I quickly noticed the Mercedes with windows rolled down parked out front was providing the thumpa thump. The generator out back kept the lights on. They faded in and out in time with the generator's occasional stumbles. The Postman's Motto drifted back into my head. I marveled with mixed emotions at how packed the bar was. "We gays, we're a resilient lot really," I thought.
Facing an adverse society will do that . . .
But at the same time, I felt dismayed that so many of us would take refuge in a bar. It smacked of the escapism that I'd hoped the blackout would usher us to shed. I reeled myself back from the absurd dimensions of my idealism – "Everyone is entitled to choose their own campfire and lord knows tequila will make it burn a bit brighter," I allowed.
7:02pm – At the corner of the Bank of America branch sat a street bum. By the looks of him, I could tell that the sun and the streets had seasoned him for some time now. He’d laid out a plaid blanket and reclined on his weathered duffle. The BF was the eternal Florence Nightingale, always offering to buy food or offer spare change to anyone who was in need. He deposited a dollar in the man’s outstretched mug and immediately wound into a pirouette. He spun like a spinning lotus firework on the fourth of July until the spark of helping someone in need dissipated. The street bum parted his lips in a weak but determined smile, and revealed the price the streets had extracted from his mouth. The teeth that remained in his mouth were like the columns of the Parthenon that refused to relent no matter the burdens cast upon them.
The blackout had blown him a cheerful windfall of people with cash and little else to spend it on. But the blackout had also brought us all a step closer to street bums ourselves. It had silently narrowed the gulf that separated us from this man at the bank corner. Perhaps the donations were our bribe that we paid him should the gulf narrow further and the blackout continue. Perhaps he would share with us the secret to an existence without ‘things’.
As we stepped to cross the driveway, a new Mercedes Benz rolled in front of us with an urgency that would have flattened us had we persisted in our right-of-way. The Benz vaulted into the first parking slot with the precision of a gymnast sticking a 10 point landing. As the door swung open a woman clutching an expensive looking hand bag made for the idle ATM. She perched her sunglasses on her coiffure and furrowed through her purse as her heels grazed the uneven pavement.
The BF and I stopped to see how long it would take before the unavoidable realization. As her would-be road kill, we figured the passive revenge of the moment would suffice once she realized her predicament had an audience. Now five paces from a darkened bank of useless ATM’s, the woman came to halt. The hand that held her wallet lilted like the petal of a water-starved Iris. The woman and the bum had traded places in an instant. She was cashless and desperate, and he was flushed with dollar bills and without a care.
7:36pm – We had now made it through the length of Hillcrest. The BF and I were now masters of the street intersection jazz. The sun had dipped into the ocean, extinguishing the last of its heat and a strange darkness now masked the bustling sidewalks. Head lights and tail lights gave us fleeting glimpses of our fellow revelers. Several resourceful restaurants were full of silhouetted faces and shadowy waiters gingerly navigating the half-light of candle lit tables.
I turned back to see the sight of the street flowing like a moat of headlights bounded by darkened castle walls.
The moon charged to the center of the night sky stage like a soloist in a spot light. With the city lights now hushed into darkness, the moon's light echoed across the sky almost unchallenged save for the chorus sung by the emerging choir of stars. And what a choir.
We were joined in our journey by a neighbor friend who revealed he was an amateur astronomer. He served as our aficionado at tonight's starlight opera. Cassiopeia and Orion took the place of Maria Callas and Luciano Pavarotti. He weaved a tapestry in the night sky that left our eyes wide in wonderment of what true darkness had revealed.
I lamented the presence of the moon – how it denied children tonight of the sight I had known as a child. To see our place in the galaxy with our own eyes. The giant Milky Way accretion disk laid out before us, glowing with a subtlety that no LED screen could duplicate. It was a perspective no amount of electricity or technology could give us, but rather one that electricity had robbed.
8:22pm – We retraced our steps back towards our apartment, wading through crowds of blackout orphans. "That was us, orphaned from our technology," I proclaimed, "Blackout Orphans!" The BF liked the analogy, but quickly urged me on lest I get too eloquent with it. We weaved back through the abandoned shopping center. Its blackened windows reflected the moon's amplified light.
When we rounded the corner, I was the first to detect the faint pleading sound of violin strings. Through the silence of the blackout, the notes danced off the stucco walls. I drew us to the source like a magnet. There in a darkened arch, was a lone fiddler. Such a sweet song poured from his instrument. The melody trickled down his leg to his tapping feet below, like fine scotch whiskey being poured over ice. We joined the audience of fellow orphans and soaked up the sound with our darkness heightened senses.
As his bow drew the last note from his fiddle, we clapped our appreciation. Above us, from darkened windows, applause and whistles joined ours. I looked up from our orchestra seats, towards the box seats above to glimpse our fellow admirers. In a darkened window, I could see a woman flickering her flashlight towards another window. I looked across to see where she was shining her light. There, in the opposite window was the dimly lit smiling face of a little girl. Herself clad with a flashlight, she returned the secret code. Two strangers united by a thin strand of flickering light in the darkness. A shrill motherly voice shouted, "Don't waste that light!" And with that, the little girl's light winked out. The thin strand was broken. I smiled at their chance encounter.
9:23pm – Back at our pitch black apartment, we invited our neighbor to bring whatever snacks and refrigerated items he did not want to see spoil for a late dinner party. While he went off to rummage in the darkness, we went to the task of pushing back the darkness in our apartment. Soon the apartment took on the flickering glow of a Catholic prayer station. The BF went off to round up another orphan from down the street.
Now four strong, we reconvened in our impromptu homage to St. Lucia, the Lutheran patron saint of light. In the midst of our hasty feast, we placed our disaster radio and listened as authorities described how they would reconnect our recently severed umbilicals. A ting of regret swept through me as I realized the electric dawn was approaching. Sweeping from the fringes of our cities, into their dense cores, soon the artificial light would dissolve our feast. Soon we would retreat back into our devises and be absorbed into our TV screens . . . the lights blinked on and a chorus of cheers erupted.
The moon receded as the house lights came up . . . ah, but what a show it was.
Blong – my dominatrix cracked her techno whip as if to remind me who was boss. Doodle da deep, Doodle da deep, Doodle da deep, she continued, as five-hour-old-old texts snapped from her riding crop. I stepped back from my iPhone's spontaneous orgasm and looked at my fellow orphans. "Ya know, that was fun," I offered, "Maybe we should unplug ourselves on our own sometime?" As tantalizing as my suggestion was, I could see by the looks on their faces, I had gotten a bit too bohemian for them.
We said our goodbyes as we each blew out the candles. I silently bade farewell to St. Lucia as I blew out mine. According to legend, she had torn out her eyes and given them to her persistent suitor who admired them so, proclaiming, "Now let me live to God!" She had cast herself into permanent darkness in order to better see what gave meaning to her life.
I turned off my iPhone, picked up a pen and began to write....
Cast of Characters (in order of appearance):
Narrator - Tim
Bagel Boy - Jeff
Postal Counter Clerk - Lisa
BF's Roommate - Rich
BF - Eric
Street Bum - St. Anthony (patron Saint of lost souls)
Mercedes Woman - (Mrs.) Zaccheaus (Book of Luke)
Half Moon - Self
Neighbor - Dennis
Fiddler - John
Woman With Flashlight - Michelle
Little Girl With Flashlight - Rachel
Black Out Orphan (dinner guest) - (Big) Eric
Sta. Lucia - Herself
Author's Notes:
On September 9, 2011, Southern California, parts of Tijuana and Arizona experienced a blackout that lasted over eight hours. When the blackout occurred, I realized that this would be a rare opportunity to observe and document what it meant for us, as a technologically dependent society to adapt to the sudden loss of things that had become so basic to all of us. Would we fall apart, or come closer together? Would we spend the hours lamenting being cut off, or would we see subtle things that we had lost without noticing? I dialed my senses to 'high' and began mentally documenting the journey that unfolded.
I was influenced in this writing by Renaissance art I had been studying. I decided to write each moment as an illuminator would illuminate the letters in a manuscript. I would create my own 'book of hours', with all the vivid colors and rich hues that were common in that period.
Technology in many respects has become its own religion. There is no arguing that some of the affect of technology's permeation into our lives has been a greater interconnectedness than any generation has ever seen, but it has also imparted human isolation – we have cloistered ourselves in our own creations. I examined this phenomenon through the lens of both sexuality and religion, because I feel they represent our effort to remain connected to each other and the world around us. I began to hunt for all our lost pennies. Things we may never have realized were lost until suddenly and without notice, our technology was ripped from us like Sta. Lucia's eyes.
