What have I learned from living without power for 4 days? Electricity is loud and a vital ingredient to hot showers, but I can't complain. Our forefathers lived full lives without electricity. More people have lived their entire lives without a smartphone or internet or an automobile or MTV and CNN and endless reruns of Yes, Dear than you can shake a stick at. Literally.
The things you tend to notice is how much of our lives is made up of answering one question, "What do you want to do?" which is another way of saying, "How can I be entertained and not bored because life is pretty empty sometimes?" Which isn't a bad thing, because, after all, life itself is pretty tedious. We fill it up with the events that make our lives worthwhile. We surround ourselves with people who are fun and interesting. We live in communities because we like having people around, because loneliness sucks. So we look to each other for cheap entertainment, because we are pretty cheap creatures, always looking for the best deal, like allowing Eversave and Group-On to fill up our inbox with countless emails for deals on massages and golf trips because we desire to be entertained, to escape the dullness of life, even with electricity.
For the most part life without electricity is pretty lame. You wake up when the sun comes up and get pretty tired when the sun goes down. Walking around Boston and thinking about how much of my life depends on electricity I started thinking, "what would my job be like without electricity, what purpose would I serve?" The answer is pretty limited. It would be different. I could not work the way I work without the technology reliant on electricity, no emails, no computers period. Telephones might get dicey. So it inevitably begs the question, "What did we do before electricity?" The answer is, we worked from sun up to sun down, getting food, because we get fucking hungry and we need to eat. If we have oil lamps we light them in the dark to go to the bathroom. If you are loaded you might have a lot of them working at once while you read a book, not a Kindle or Nook, a libro del papel. Old school. Escuela Abuelo. Grandfather school.
It's not a bad way to look at the world. For the most part I felt like when I was going to work I was being ferried into a land of wonders because Boston still had electricity while going home it was like standing in some dark Dosteovskian epoch where all the action is done in the night.
On my runs around town you could hear the whurr of the generators going from everyone's backyards, powering their refrigerators and maybe a lamp or TV if the generator was strong enough. Restaurants that had power have had a bit of a surprise end-of-summer boom, while most people are usually exiting town for the Labor Day/ Back to School time, the town has relied heavily on the places who can cook them a meal.
So the summer is over, but I'm fighting it in the usual way. I'm taking a trip. Because routine is dull and needs to be broken and an untraveled life is a wasted life.
Oh and the cheap entertainment while living in the dark was playing cards with my father by a flashlight lantern. It felt just like old times.
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