mmmmcmxxii

The Great San Francisco Blackout of 2025

Of all the metaphors for death, a power outage?

Yes, and on the Saturday before Christmas.  It’s

happening.  And so are these lines.  During the

very event.  But I can no longer read my own

handwriting, so who knows, really?  It’s all spec

ulative for now, especially given that the power

went out around 1pm at my place, I needed sleep,

checked the news, saw that yes, there was a pretty

widespread power outage in the city, but the elect

ricity was expected to be restored by around 3:45pm.

So I slipped into a deep, much-needed slumber, expecting

to stay under for an hour or two. When I woke up, and

it took me at least an hour to even ascertain this,

it was nearly 10pm, and my place was pitch black.

I rounded myself up and went out to charge some

things (dinner and my phone, to be specific), stopped

at The Melt on Market, which was open, and they had

electrical outlets in the dining area – I asked before I

ordered a burger, fries and strawberry milkshake to

ensure the outlets actually worked—the cashier nodded

a yep—so I sat down at my table with my little buzzy

square, plugged things in, and of course there was no

working electricity in the dining room of The Melt.  I

was irritated, but not angry, asked that my food be

bagged and wound up eventually in the lobby of the

ugly jukebox-shaped Marriott by the Metreon, where

I charged my phone up to about 40% and began

checking around to see if I could see when my power

might be restored.  The official website declared my lights

should be back up at about 12:30am, so I left the Marriott

at around 11:45pm, walked back to my apartment, only

to learn once logging back on that the ETA to get the power

back had changed from 12:30am to 9am.  That’s a difference.

So what did I do, wide awake in a very dark apartment for

the next few hours?  I sat up in my bed half under covers

and played games on my phone until it was down to 1%.

Which was about 3am.  Then, with my big toe wrapped

around the neck of the one rechargeable light source, a

miniature pink dinosaur lamp that I’ve had for a few years,

I read some poetry, hovering over each page with my 

reading glasses on and the dinosaurs face, my one source

of light, pointed in the same direction. I wrote these lines, 

and so who knows how this will come out, if at all, if I

can decipher a word of it when I have the chance.  And

then I wrote another piece.  After which the light from

the dinosaur had grown so dim that it was as if we were

both squinting pretty ferociously onto the pages, back and 

forth between the lovely book I was reading and the journal 

onto which I was writing these words. No lessons here. Con

sider this one a diary entry (older ones were the original source

material for most all of these pieces, the catalyst for this 20 plus

year project) to mark the underwhelming if not apposite

event, this, the most enduring power outage I’ve known thus 

far during my 25 years here in San Francisco. Under other circum

stances, in better times (?), this could have been an adventurous, 

relaxing, pleasant and/or romantic how-many-ever hours or so, rather

than a bookmark in one of the most nerve-jangling, demoralizing

chapters in this life (I’ll just add that this all-too-optimistic soul

feels it necessary to point out that it is, however, by no means,

the worst chapter).