It’s just been one of those days -- one of those weeks -- in which it seems the world is going to hell. It’s 92 degrees at 9:53pm in New York City, in the greenest part of the Bronx where it’s always at least 5 degrees cooler than it is in Manhattan. I’ve been kept superbusy -- kept from the important work of blogging, that is -- by a freelance gig at a fashion magazine where the biggest worry is whether the photos of the $20,000 diamond wedding rings are big enough. But at least I was in out of the heat all day -- my apartment, where I usually work, is not air-conditioned; who can afford it, when my Con Ed bill is running 100 bucks a month without an AC, or a hair dryer, or a washing machine, or any major appliance apart from a fridge that is notorious for sucking up power? But then again, Con Ed (that’s the local power utility) was calling for major corps around Manhattan to reduce their power usage this afternoon in an attempt to avoid having to go to rolling blackouts in the extraordinary heat, which meant that the major-corporate-owned mag I was working at turned off some of the elevators and most of the lights and lowered the AC. Which was fine, actually, cuz it’s always too bright and way too cold there.
That’s how it is in New York in the summer: you carry a sweater and put it on when you get indoors -- in an office, a movie theater, a subway car -- because indoors is like a meat locker. I’m dreadfully afraid we’re going to look back on these days of beautiful frigid AC in hellish July with a wistful nostalgia, unless someone comes up with clean, safe fusion power fast. All these places -- underground subway trains, hermetically sealed office buildings -- are going to be uninhabitable between May and September if we ever get to a point at which the power to run AC is beyond the means of mere mortals. And how can that not happen, when a “tumble” in the price of oil today reduced it to levels that would have made us blanch a mere five years ago? When gas can be at a gasp-inducing $3-plus a gallon and no one seems to care?
I mean, look: I drove out to Long Island (in a high-mileage econo rental car that sucked up $37 worth of gas) this weekend to visit family, and in both directions, coming and going, a trip that should have taken an hour and twenty minutes took more than two and a half hours. The roads were packed with people driving god knows where. And believe me, I appreciate the irony of bitching about where-the-hell-are-people-driving when I’m driving a car myself. I’ve frequently pretended to justify this to myself by saying that mass transit is horribly inconvenient and takes three times as long as driving... but that’s not so much the case when everyone and his grandma is on the road. And yet, how can I stop at Target and buy cheap cat litter when I’m riding taxis and commuter railroads and subways and buses, all of which would have to be involved were I to have done the same trip sans car?
Soon, though, the cat litter won’t be so cheap at Target, I guess. Already, it seems that the price of just about everything in the supermarket has jumped 20 percent or more. Costs more to get it to the Stop & Shop, I guess.
And can you believe this? The Starbucks across the street from the office yesterday was out of ice in the afternoon. How can I get the caffeine jolt from my iced joe that gets me through the afternoon if there’s no ice, and the next nearest Starbucks is another 600 feet away?
*sigh* There’s a thunderstorm coming up now, at 10:12pm, bringing a cool breeze. Cool being perhaps 85 degrees. The lightning is pretty, though.
But still, all day, and yesterday too, power disruptions were a major hassle -- too many people cranking the AC, leaving it on all day while they’re at work so the place is coolish when they get home. But damn: is it worth shutting down subways -- which lose power or get their third rails buckled in the heat -- so that Joe Blow from Red Hook doesn’t have to wait five minutes for his apartment to cool down when he gets home after being gone 12 hours? I came home yesterday to discover that the uninterruptible power supply that protects my computer from random power flucuations -- which are all too prevalent in my neighborhood even on the best of days -- had just given up and shut itself off in a fit of frustration.
But oh, is this enough? No. Tonight on MSNBC and CNN it’s all Hezbollah saying it “welcomes World War III,” while on network TV, which despite its decreasing influence is still by far the most watched primetime programming, it’s almost literally the gladiatorial competitions that characterized the “bread and circuses” of the dying Roman Empire: on ABC, it’s Music Star; on NBC, Last Comic Standing; on CBS, Rock Star: Supernova. Which millions of Americans are watching while they inhale their carb-heavy Happy Meals. (But god forbid a doctor deem a kid heavier than 95 percent of his peers "fat", whatever you do.) All that distinguishes our bloodsport from the Romans’ is that we do not demand the losers actually die. But good news! The U.S. government magnanimously deciding to waive the usual evacuation fee for American citizens seeking to leave Beirut! Hurrah!
Seriously, is it any wonder that I had no recourse but to declare this week Bruce Campbell Week at FlickFilosopher? The escape... the sweet, sweet escape...
(Technorati tags: gas prices, heat+wave, power outages, World War III, bread and circuses)
