In Search of Morning Wood. But It's Not What You Think.

5:30 am. Thursday.

I wake up in pitch darkness, teeth chattering. 

The fireplace is empty, save for a few glowing embers. We ran out of firewood around 2AM. It's snowing outside and we have no heat. The power has been out for, like, a million days. Or two days. I have no idea anymore. I feel weak and confused. I reach for the wineglass I drained at midnight. There are a few crumbs of chocolate cake in it. But not for long.

It's very dark down here in the lower floor of my split-level house. The only light - dim and flickering -   comes from the yarzheit memorial candle I have from my mom's funeral last April, and which I lit last night when I was trying to discern the difference between Robin's nighttime meds and the bottle of Imodium I spilled on the bathroom counter. I can make out Imodium by feel (ancestral knowledge) but Robin was nervous and insisted on lighting the candle because his meds need to, I don't know, keep him alive since his cancer. God, Robin totally sweats the small stuff. After he comes back with coffee that he made me outside in the snow on the BBQ, and finds the creamer he buried in the snow last night because the refrigerator isn't working, I am totally going to talk to him about being a more chill person.

No heat. No light. No way to cook. No hot water. Almost a foot of snow under a layer of ice. No snowplows available. The PGE truck caught on fire and they don't know when another one will be found to restore our power. We are unshowered. We are cold. We are a little bit buzzed from the wine we're drinking for strength. The dogs are covered in snow and they're snuggling up to us for warmth, so now we're soaking and everything stinks like wet dog. The dryer broke a week ago but the repairperson can't get here to fix it on account of the snow, and even if he could get here, we have no electricity so it's all moot and dismal and bullshit, anyway. The world is mean and dank and hopeless, and nobody cares about you.

This is exactly how I've imagined life under Trump is going to be. Except without the coffee. Because I won't want to be awake.

Brothers and sisters: I have seen the future. The next years are going to be dark and cold; you're gonna be constipated, everything is going to smell like wet dog and your dryer will be broken.

Oh, and you'll be out of firewood. Which we are right now.

Word is, there is still some to be found at Wal-Mart. 

Wal-Mart?  Lord, why do you test me?

I have never been to a Wal-Mart. Just as I have never been to a public execution or eaten at a KFC or donated to the Salvation Army, or visited a vomitorium. And just as my parents refused to go to Knott's Berry Farm, or buy any Welch's products or bitch slap a kitten. I hold all these things to be equal. I do not traffic with union-busting, homophobic, women-shaming reactionaries. I have no truck with the devil.

But firewood. But heat.

But Wal-Mart.

Sophie's choice.

If this were my novel and I wrote, "just as we approached the turn for Wal-Mart, I got a text saying that the power was back on", you would slam the novel shut and spit on it. Just at that moment, indeed. You would call Deus ex machina bullshit on me and write a bad review of me on amazon. And you would be justified.

But that is what happened. Hand to Deus.

Robin turned the car around and we went home, blasted the central heating, charged up the computers and resumed our Facebook Scrabble game from four days ago. Life was back to normal.

But I had seen the future; the post-inauguralyptic world. And brothers and sisters, just like my two beloved wet Poodles now sleeping soundly and farting silently on my bed as I write this, it stinks.

Power to the people.

 

 

 

  

Comments

[Hawi Moore]

Nice article