The Night That the Lights Went Out in Kansas

Last week, tragedy struck. The electricity went out in my house for five days. Now, before you say, "Stuart, that hardly constitutes a tragedy," you'd best hear me out. Note that I didn't say five minutes, nor a piddly five hours. We're talking five DAYS. That's five days and four nights of sitting in the dark and sweating in the insufferable heat with absolutely NOTHING to do. That fully constitutes a tragedy in my book and I don't want to hear from any nay-sayers either!

It was a silent, but deadly storm (kinda like a fart) and it didn't last all that long, maybe 45 minutes tops. But the damage was incredible. And I slept through it all. I didn't mean to, mind you. But I was relaxed all the way back in my electric recliner with the dogs cowering on the floor below me and I nodded off. What awoke me was a series of transformers in the back yard cracking and popping like the Fourth of July.

And here's where the REAL tragedy hit. I was stuck in my recliner. All the way back, I couldn't scoot out to the footrest for fear that my weight might break it. Mercifully, my phone was next to me so I texted my wife with the tragic news. (Sidebar: While I was suffering the utmost in indignity and tragedy, my wife was gallivanting across the country with her mother, just having a merry ol' carefree time. The nerve!).

I wrote, "The power just went out and I'm stuck in our electric recliner with no way out!"

In return, I got no sympathy. Just much, much laughter and they shared my terrible predicament on our family group text thread. STILL no sympathy.

Finally, I put on my contortion pants and managed to roll sideways out of the recliner onto the other half of the love seat while my dogs watched this all in horrified bemusement, thinking "crazy-ass human."

Okay! Out of the loveseat! Now what? My phone was getting low on its battery, so I thought I'd call everybody I knew. But I couldn't get a clear message out and my texts weren't sending. However, I was able to get through to the electricity robot to report our outage, so that wasted a couple minutes. Finally, my neighbors got a text through to me and asked if I wanted to join them on a little neighborhood walk to survey the damage. I jumped at the chance, having not had human contact in over a week.

Except I couldn't get out of the house. A huge bunch of branches blocked my exit, barricading the stoop and stairs. With the help of my neighbor, we managed to move them and I tasted freedom! 

The damage was intense throughout the 'hood. Trees were downed everywhere. My deck furniture had all overturned, the table hurled out into the yard, the top having spun off like a Frisbee. There were more tree limbs covering yards than grass. Houses were damaged by fallen trees, windows had imploded (not sure how), and people were out in their yards taking in the catastrophe in stunned disbelief. It looked like a war-torn, devastated bomb-site.

Not really wanting to go sit by myself in the dark, I asked the neighbors to join me for a margarita on my deck. Hallelujah, they accepted.

You know, the first night was kinda fun in a strange way. There I was kicking it old school, like the pioneers of yesteryear, hanging out and reading by candlelight. Cool! I was somewhat giddy because I knew--absolutely KNEW--that the power would be restored sometime in the night and all would soon go back to being cool and comfy and kosher again.

So much for naïve optimism. After my neighbors left, I managed to bypass the electric company robot and got a person on the phone. She said, "Hmmm, let's see... Yes, there's been an outage reported in your area. Annnnnnddddd....okay, it looks like they had it set to be fixed by 5:30. Considering it's 9:00, that didn't happen. You're not alone, sir. There are 200,000 houses without electricity."

"200,000 houses! Um...then it's going to be a minute, isn't it?"

"Yes sir."

My heart sank along with any hopes of this being a temporary, minor electricity-free set-back. And with my phone dying, there was absolutely NOTHING to do. Potato chips were the only thing I could find in the dark to eat, not the most well-balanced meal in the world. And I know my wife has a battalion of flashlights strategically placed around the house for such an emergency, but I couldn't find a single one. Not in the dark, not with my phone on its last legs.

Remember what I said about being giddy, enjoying the ol' pioneer days as our ancestors had? By day two, I was kinda grumbly and mumbly, getting kinda pissy, sweating and bored and desperately needing some kind of human interaction and distraction.

By day three, I was like "SCREW Davey Crockett and those other pioneer guys! They never even knew the comforts--no...the NECESSITY--of air conditioning and electric lights so they were perfectly content to sit around campfires in their stupid coon-skin caps, doing absolutely NOTHING! DICKS! They probably didn't even READ!"

Thankfully, my daughter felt bad and came down the next day and took me to dinner before sending me back inside to the infernal house of doom and gloom, to sit in the dark and drink beer because there was nothing else to do.

Talk about tragic.

The next day, hey, whaddaya know? Another thunderstorm! Huzzah! Thus making it even too dark to read. In the meantime, I took to running my car in the driveway to charge up my phone. But after calling and/or texting everyone, I resorted to gaming. Which immediately sapped my battery again.

Our upstairs bedroom was absolutely sweltering, so I moved downstairs to the guest bedroom. But one of my dogs wouldn't come down, his whole existence being thrown into total disarray. So, in the dark, I stumbled up there, picked him up (his paws swimming at the air and fighting me) and carried him downstairs. Managed to do it without breaking a limb, too, a minor miracle.

And I was in for a horrible sweaty night. 

The kicker of it is while our entire block was out of electricity, all of the neighbors across the street never lost their power. Another of my fellow suffering neighbors said that after this was all over, we should have a party and not invite the people across the street. I agreed. We didn't want those stupid-head, electricity-enjoying jerks at our party, no way. Not after lording it over us lowly electricity-deficient people across the street. JERKS.

Meanwhile (when my phone had a full charge), I mercilessly stalked the power company's website map, taking note of when (if?) they'd ever assign a team to our problem. Sometimes we'd come close, with a team being assigned, only to have it go back to "waiting to be assigned." Over and over and over...

It turned out that there was a MAJOR problem with our block. Behind us and down about three houses, a colossal tree had toppled and completely broke off an electric pole. (A neighbor told me, 'Too bad the tree didn't fall the other way and take out the "Vets For Trump' sign.") So, the company took a look at that, shook their heads, and said, "Nope! We're not gonna waste four trucks and sixteen hours on a measly 60 houses being without power, when we can go for the larger outages in less time, and suck up all the heroic glory!" We had become marginalized because there weren't enough homes without power in our 'hood. We were near last in line.

The icing on the cake? The guy whose tree toppled the electric pole? He wasn't worried, because he had a ginormous, loud-ass generator! I felt like pounding on his door and yelling "let me in! I wanna stream some Netflix, dammit! Jerk-face! Hope you're enjoying your air conditioning!"

But hope springs eternal! My wife was finally--FINALLY--due back on the third day! HURRAH! Someone to share in my suffering and listen to my complaining and empathize with my endless pain!

The minute she stepped into the hot box, she said, "Uh-uh. Not doing it. Pack up! I found a dog-friendly hotel."

At long last (thanks to my friend, Yvonne, one of the last hold-outs on our street and my eyes on the ground), power was restored! HooRAH! And booooooooooo to the thousand dollars worth of food we had to toss out.

See what I mean by "tragedy?"

I swan (and you guys KNOW I hate "swanning") if any idiot climate change deniers starts spouting off their crap to me about how it's all bunk, I think a well-placed punch to their neck is a totally acceptable response. Then I'll lock them up in a hot box for four nights and five days.

Speaking of morons, they don't come any dumber than the protagonist of my comical murder mystery Zach and Zora series. You see, Zach (a male stripper, but call him a "male entertainment dancer"),  a dunderhead's dunderhead, just can't help but continue to find dead bodies of which he's usually implicated for the murder. Thankfully, his sharp (but much aggravated and usually pregnant) sister, Zora, is an accomplished sleuth who digs him out of more jams than a butter knife. Read the books that nobody's talking about and absolutely no one is clamoring for a fourth in the series (but it's coming one day, anyway), and start with the first, Bad Day in a Banana Hammock.