On Wednesday, rain fell and froze everything. The trees - sensitive as they are - freaked the fuck out. Heavy with ice and rageful, trees across the city decided to let their branches snap all the way off and fall mostly onto power lines. A million or so people (ourselves included) were left without power for a couple of days as a result. Hundreds of thousands of people are still without power.
We’re not able or willing to give you a rundown of how or why this event happened. We aren’t an ice scientist, tree psychologist, or power grid aficionado. We just know we didn’t have power for a while. We can’t speak for others, but the experience was approximately as interesting as it sounds. It wasn’t the end of the world. Or, rather, it wasn’t more end-of-the-world-y than most things. We recognize, though, that we are very privileged. Neither we nor anyone we care about was harmed (physically, financially, or otherwise) by the storm or what followed. In addition, electricity is just a luxury for us. Neither our survival nor our well-being depends on electricity coming straight or regularly into our home. We’re fortunate and grateful for the privilege. The days without power were remarkably unremarkable.
We’ll spare you an overwrought account of some uninteresting days, but we figured we’d (quickly) share the strangest thing about losing power. Namely, that we worried about this thing (whatever it is). We worried that we wouldn’t have experiences worth writing about. We worried that if the power stayed out we wouldn’t be able to write about the experiences that weren’t worth writing about. We worried that people - for some reason - expected us to talk about this storm, the power outages, and everything else. We worried that people - for better reasons - didn’t at all want us to talk about some distant ice thing or loss of power.
None of this, of course, is on you. You are, lovely as you each are, mostly just an idea to us. All the same, though, it just struck us as strange and maybe nice that our experience of powerlessness was suffused with many (sort of) strangers who may or may not be experiencing the same thing. All the worrying, of course, is just an indication of care, so - well - thanks for giving us something to care about other than all the music we weren’t listening to, movies we weren’t watching, articles we weren’t reading, or electricity we weren’t using.
We’ll be back with the usual whatever it is we do on Sunday. In meantime, here’s a photograph of what our house looked like last night around this time:
P.S. We feel bad offering nothing of substance in this post, so for the first and last time we’re going to ignore our mission to exclusively discuss Montreal-y things and just name five things that are great and might well make your day even better than it already is. So, here are five things:
Frank Bidart’s Guilty of Dust
Edward Yang’s Terrorizers
Joanne Robertson’s Blue Car
Daro Sulakauri’s photography
Jadé Fadojutimi talking about painting
I recall Yang's film as being very unconventional and it did not follow regular film structure. His Taipei characters get involved in tiny incidents that seem to snowball into huger events. Not everyone's cup of tea, of course, but human experiences and identity issues can be engrossing at times. And on an icy day, why not?
"All the worrying, of course, is just an indication of care" ❤️