"Six-teen Can-dles!"
...and a Flashlight.
A week later, and still no coherent discussion on our national energy woes.
It's enough to make you go back and TURN EVERYTHING OFF, light a candle, and have a pleasant conversation with friends and family. Just like last week. And just say "to hell" with poliiticians and utility execs, all.
On August 14, we had the chance to stand outside our building and look up at the stars. We saw the big dipper that night! For the first time in years. All of those damn lights make them so hard to see...
(Oh, yeah..., over time we had forgotten about all of these quiet, non-electric niceties. But, after a four and a half mile walk home last week, all of them actually felt pretty good. And fun.)
From our end, New Yorkers were all that you heard. Plucky, friendly, calm, etc.—all that we're proud of here.
Of course, as one of the many who have lived through all three now, I have a theory as to why it was more like '65, and not like '77.
I fully and thoroughly disagree with the press assessments of '77 being a time of animals. Or of '65 or '03 being times of good-good people.
Primarily, the '65 and '03 blackouts occurred in the late summer afternoon. This year's was at 4:14 pm, and I recall 1965's as going down, approx. 5:00 pm-ish, since I remember listening to perhaps the world's greatest disc jockey of all time, Dan Ingram of WABC Music Radio77 at the precise minute everything other than our trusty transistor radios shut off.
This, I believe, gave everyone three to four hours of daylight to comprehend what was going on, bitch, moan, realize they were safe, become aware of the safety or peril of those around them and begin to figure out strategies for themselves. How to get home; how to find loved ones; how to deal with the melting ice cream, etc.
Acknowledged difficulties bond people. It's that simple.
In 1977, it was a brutally hot night, with high humidity and no breeze. Also, it was approximately 10:00 pm. I was sitting at home, in front of a fairly useless fan, watching the tail end of a terrible movie I had been hoping would distract me from how hot it was. I was fifteen minutes away from the end of this movie, riding it out doggedly to the end, then sputter, sputter, pop. Dark. (I never have learned how that movie ended.)
Instead of things merely no longer working, as in the two other blackouts, 8 million people were plunged into sudden, total darkness. In an instant, everyone was alone in the dark The only light came from the headlights of cars, which if you've ever tried navigating through an otherwise dark parking lot after an event, you'll know this casts an eerie, unearthly, Salvador Dali glow on everything. Everything is thrown off. Mostly, your balance.
In '77, everyone's first reaction was fear. Then, anger. Then, panic. Then, pow. It's not such a great leap of imagination that it would turn into a scene from The Day of the Locusts.
If it happened at 10:00 pm this year, you'd again be seeing scores of accounts of the base inhumanity of "these East Coast savages."
You see, it's all in the timing...
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posted by Gotham 1:14 AM
