Lights Out

At 1:30 a.m., a rare thing happened here in downtown: the power went out.

I only know this because the sudden departure of sound woke me up. (I can snooze through a tornado, but a quiet room will keep me up all night.)

Never one to miss such an opportunity, I stepped outside. There's an almost complete absence of light and sound—interrupted only by the pattering of falling rain—in an area usually humming with a subliminal orchestra of electrical equipment and glowing streetlights.

You don't usually notice all of it... until the orchestra stops playing. Now the world feels somehow wrong, even as it regresses to its default, more primal setting. I can't say whether there's a statement here on modern civilization and its impact on our senses, partly because I'm not really qualified to make such a pontification, but mostly because my sleep-deprived brain is trying to think at 2-freakin'-a.m.

Also, I'm realizing how loudly my cats snore, and it's terribly distracting.

In any case, now that I've dutifully chronicled the experience, I hope for electricity's swift return, because I can't sleep.