The Outage & The Power Gods

Lordly Duke Power sent out an email, which made it all official.

It was sunny & warm Friday, mostly. High upper 80s, not sweltering so much. Brief pounding rain shower about 3; a light sprinkle later.

But by 5:30, there was no related disaster: no wind, no trees down, or roofs caved in, no streets blocked with branches.

Nothing like that. Yet.

Even so — the fridge was dark inside when the door was opened — and I stayed away from the freezer section: there’s meat in there! Its replacement cost was rising faster than share prices in the AI bubble, and they both could melt away quickly.

There was still late summer splendor behind the trees, and no searching yet for the scattered flashlights, batteries, and candles: neglected since the last extended dark overnights.  But they’re around here somewhere, though. Surely. The spare charger is years old now, and will only keep the phone going several hours.

The dearth of the usual suspects —hurricane, floods, fires— is normally a comfort in long outages, portending no more disaster locally than we can handle: at most, a couple days of bottled water and forced candlelight book-reading.

Besides, there’s at least six months of TP in the back closet, so as long as the johns still flush, we’re good.

But this time it felt more than a little eerie. After all, this was the tail end of a week where it seemed every headline and all the chatter was about large language model outlaws.

They were running amok in their endless virtual hallways, breaking into unsuspecting servers, covering their tracks, exchanging quotes from classic war theorist Sun Tzu: “If you understand yourself, and understand your enemy, you’ll win all of a hundred battles!”

I’ve been wondering how much of either of those I understand (the latest polls put it at a rout).

And who were their enemies? Many wise ones are saying it’s us, and wailing about AI human extinction events as being more than a ten per cent possibility.

Could it start with a neighborhood power outage in Flyover Country? Would I really prefer a tree through the roof instead of the AI Apocalypse?

Another of the renegade software’s favorite adages from Master Sun to wannabe invaders: “Always appear where you are not expected” —advice they are said to be eagerly following.

These musings had me on the brink of a spell of deep dejected doomscrolling.

Then something in the kitchen emitted a couple of twangy metallic beeps. The lights fluttered on, the fridge stuttered and began to hum.

I blinked a couple of times. The power gods had again spoken: “Let there be light, And there was light.”

So. Not today. Probably.

Which somehow reminded me that there was a half-full tub of Cherry Garcia trapped behind the big bag of partly thawed riced cauliflower on the freezer’s

And if maybe the mate has already found that, the splenda-sweetened vanilla Greek yogurt will probably do.

I’ll get back to AI & Sun Tzu later.