Steve Franklin's Journal: Four Nights in the Dark

Four nights in the dark. Staring at the wall by candlelight remembering the lies told by the power company last time a storm brought down their pitiful spider web of wires strung between the trunks of dead trees. "Next time we will have the power restored to everyone in four days," when it had taken four days to restore MY power that time the ice brought down some wires. Not much improvement there, I thought. Had I only known.

Four nights reading by flashlight in the evening after mowing the lawn and pruning the shrubs and mowing the back lawn and pruning some more shrubs. What else can you do? Listening to the radio in the car being told by the sub-idiot representative of the idiot power company that if I see any linemen (what linemen?) I should offer them a cold drink. And where do they think I will get this cold drink when my refrigerator has been dead for three days and counting and the supermarkets are all posting signs saying "Sorry, we regret that we have no more ice to sell"?

And the sub-sub-idiot radio announcer telling us we should look at this in perspective and not asking the basic question--because of his 15-minute attention span apparently--that needs to be asked: "Why did you lie to us Ms. Representative of the Power Company that still hangs wires from the trunks of dead trees" like they did in my Japanese woodblock print of Kyoto made before World War One.

While our hayseed president spends billions filling body bags in the Middle East and making little old ladies take off their shoes for their Federal Foot Inspection--God help us if the damned loony Arab had supposited his bomb up his backside--the lying power company can't run a power system that isn't secure against an ice storm or a little lightning and wind. What would they say if we had a real terrorist attack? "We're sorry, but we can't restore the power until the radiation goes away in 50,000 years"?

Four nights in the dark sitting in the car listening to the screaming senator with the IQ of a retarded puppy dog tell us what a heroic job the linemen are doing with help from the power companies of Arizona and other dry states. Does the senator not understand that all the body-bag-o-grams in the world and foot inspectors out the wazoo aren't going to mean a damn if the pinheads at the power company can't keep the lights on during a little natural electrical activity? Should not some heads be separated from their bodies--all within the letter of the law of course--in response to this kind of incompetance in and out of office?

No Virginia, I am not happy, and they can get their own damned cold drinks.

September 21, 2003
Still in the dark.