Living off the grid

Six days into living like a refugee and we still have no estimates as to when our power will return. On the one hand, I want to break down and cry. On the other hand, I've fallen into a sort of routine "living" at my friend E.'s and I don't feel a pressing need for power to return except that I miss spending time in the comfort of my apartment.

Tomorrow will be one full week since our power went out and still, my street looks like a war zone. About 1/2 mile away from my house, is a utility pole (with an attached streetlight) that is resting precariously on a chain link fence and power lines, and it's easy to see why I hold out absolutely zero hope that I'll be restored any time soon.

If there's a silver lining to this whole experience, it's that I'm learning who truly matters in my life and who doesn't. I have a few friends on whom I've been checking since this started and have had a few others who check in with me on a daily basis. Although I'm frustrated with this whole experience, I am truly thankful for the daily message from one friend in particular. It's nice to know that there's at least one person out there (who's not a relation) who legitimately cares about my well-being. It's the one thing that is keeping me from feeling truly miserable these days.

Writing out loud

The drawback to being a writer is the incessant need to write, to create. The more I put pen to paper (or these days, fingers to keys), the more I want to write. I have so much to say and yet somehow, I’m often at a loss when it comes to actually formulating cohesive thoughts. 

That is until today, when the most unthinkable thing happened…to me anyway. The power went out during a pretty intense thunderstorm and I was left without my connection to the real world: my trusty PowerBook G4. Well, I suppose I wasn't completely without because my Blackberry (a.k.a. my lifeline) was still working, albeit on 30 percent battery power. And the way I am with my beloved BB (that’s another story entirely!) 30 percent wasn’t likely to last long.

The thought of my potentially fleeting link to the outside world rendered me unable to process my surroundings in the moments immediately following the blackout (or was that the sudden darkness in my basement office? Who knows!). 

At any rate, that’s when it hit me… the sudden need to write.

I’m not sure what it’s like in anyone else’s head, but lately my inner voice is a constant narration – much like that of a first-person character in one of my beloved chick-lit novels (don’t judge). During my day-to-day activities I often catch myself thinking along the same lines as those characters, as though I’m telling a story. And as luck would have it, my inner narrator decided to go hog-wild right smack dab in the middle of a power outage. 

It would have been nice to have a working computer to capture it all, she thought. 

My mind went crazy. The words and thoughts and actions kept spewing forth; I couldn’t shut it off. Yet my hands were tied. I couldn’t write. 

OK, yes, I suppose I could have written – in longhand – but I learned long ago that my mind thinks a lot quicker than my hand can write and if I want to write at least semi-coherently, not to mention legibly, I need to do so with a word processor. 

Wow!  What did people do before typewriters and computers? If I was Jane Austen, forced to write my novels on loose-leaf paper by candlelight, well suffice it to say the literary world would be severely lacking right now. 

I went home and tried to take a nap, but with my mind operating in overdrive, that just wasn’t happening.  

What’s a girl to do? 

After two hours of hopelessly trying to focus my rambling mind, I grabbed a book from my coffee table and settled down to read. 

And that’s when it happened: the lights came back on. 

It was almost biblical.

And almost as sudden as the illumination of a light bulb, my creative thoughts evaporated into thin air. I had nothing of substance to write.

Oh well, there’s always next time, she thought.