Great Or Nothing

So you’re having a hurricane. 

Monday evening I was watching the hurricane coverage on TV while reading my Twitter feed on my laptop and talking to my friend Workhorse on the phone. It’s getting crazy out there, we agreed, but he said he was making pasta and about to watch some stuff on his DVR. Then the lights flickered. “Uh oh,” I said. “The light just…” He interrupted: ”Oh my god. Oh no.”  And then the phone went beep beep beep and we were disconnected. I texted him: Is your power down? are you ok? He replied: lost power… you? The tweets on my timeline came fast and furious: “all the power just went out below 34th street.” Workhorse, like many of my friends, was now in the Dead Zone. My lights, my TV, my computer, my power was still on. I didn’t realize it then, but I’d become a “have” in a city of have-nots.

Probably my favorite part of watching the storm coverage yesterday (for hours, obsessively, swaddled cozily in survivor’s guilt out here in Seattle) was when CNN, scrambling for new Sandy updates, took a lengthy detour to discuss adorable ponies.