A simple night
Yesterday evening, the power was off. The temperature reached a 100-degree high yesterday afternoon - I believe it was actually 101 degrees - and yet, my apartment wasn't all that bad when I returned home at 6pm. But, the power was indeed still out.
In the fading light of day, I read Vanity Fair’s green issue, brought to me by Bianca along with a copy of Vogue and some Cheez-its.
Once it got too dark to read, I fired up the iPod and listened to a This American Life podcast about Habeas Corpus and our interrogation prisons in Guantanamo. I dug out my LED headlamp and stood in the dark in my kitchen, cutting up tomatoes by the light of the lamp with headphones in, listening to brilliant story-telling journalism.
When I finished my tomatoes, I turned the lamp off and lay in bed, limbs outstretched, caught up in a “be here now” reverie, laughing in the dark at the humor of Ira Glass and his contributing editors.
It was the calmest I’ve been in weeks. Usually, I arrive home dog tired and look around thinking, “There are a million and three things I could be doing but all I want to do is lie down or watch a poorly copied DVD with Chinese subtitles obscuring half the screen” (sometimes I use this fact to convince myself that I’m trying to trick my subconscious into learning to read without a bit of traditional study).
But I had very few options upon returning home last night. I could do exactly what I always try not to do: lie down and pass out. And so, the simplicity of my evening struck me as delightful and completely refreshing. I suppose to become the ascetic that Jack Kerouac was during his days spent in the Cascades as a fire lookout, I’d have to trade my iPod for a CB radio and my headlamp for a box of matches. I think my 21st century version isn’t all that bad.
In fact, the moment couldn’t have been more apropos: I had just finished reading an article about the privatization of water in China (the government simply cannot handle the magnitude of the polluted water problem, which in many ways they have created in the first place and so cities are beginning to sell the problems and -soon to be – profits to a couple of French companies who specialize in water cleanup and management) and the impasse this shift is causing for poverty-stricken citizens and was delving into an article on the devastation of vast tracts of Amazonian rain forest caused by the extraction, treatment and overland transportation of oil by Texaco, now Chevron. And it struck me as incredibly convenient that as I was reading these articles, I wasn’t using the obvious evil of coal-powered electricity to read my magazine or to cool my mildly muggy room. At the same time, my iPod had been charged by an outlet the previous evening and my magazine was, most likely, not printed on 100% recyclable paper and the batteries in my headlamp are not reusable and my tomatoes were most likely grown with the help of a variety of chemicals and enhancers, but, as they say, it begins with understanding.
Oh that the power would go out more often around here. (Don’t tell any of my housemates that I said that. I’ve heard they spent quite different evenings last night.)
