The company manual probably doesn't cover this. It's the perfect public relations storm. The utility bill arrives. It's $200, almost triple what it was last month. The mercury rises to 112. And the power goes out for three hours between 3 and 6 p.m.
I'm sorry, PG&E, but I would not want to be the guy who explains what happened to me on Saturday.
There was the usual stuff -- dampened cotton clothing, desperate calls to the utility god. I have tossed and turned all night thinking about the right literary approach to describe what happened. Here goes: It was like eating spaghetti sauce with cankers in your mouth. Think blood and micro-tears in your gums when you chew your food.
Another bead of perspiration runs down my torso this morning as I write this. But the air conditioning and power obviously are back on. On the internet, the National Weather Service says it was 92 degrees at 5 a.m. Rockets and shells are battering Lebanon. A judge tells a woman, hey, it's too late to sue over her frozen embryos.
I don't know the embryo woman and what's the difference if it's 92 degrees or 90 degrees? But here's my admission for the morning. I am totally lost without electricity and the internet.
Both will be gone while I'm backpacking the John Muir Trail. Now you've got me. That's my Achilles heel. That's the modern convenience I will miss most when I'm gone a week on the JMT. I can load up on sugar and salt, no problem. But what am I going to do about my information addiction?
It's a step back in time for me. I lived without information at one time. I was kind of normal.
In the late 1960s, when I was a young teen, you didn't get news from the internet. Or even television. We had 12 channels coming through the brand new cable connection at our house. TV news was OK, but radio was where I heard things first. World Series. Landing on the moon. What happened at Woodstock. The grisly body count in the 'Nam.
More often than not, though, I listened to rock 'n' roll on radio and waited for the newspaper to come in the afternoon. I obsessively read major league baseball box scores, the comics, the obituaries and crime stuff. (Is it any wonder I've been a daily journalist for 30 years?)
Now I'm so addicted to knowing useless tidbits about what's happening in the moment that my hands are shaking when the power goes out for three hours. I crave white sugar, salt and a heaping helping of information. Twice an hour, please. I gotta have it. I gotta.
No, I'm not kidding. Yesterday, when the house got hot enough to bake a meat loaf, we took off. We had to go out to a bar to drink a strawberry margarita and eat potato skins (alcohol, salt AND sugar) so I could cool off and listen to whatever information was streaming out of the TV.
My hands stopped shaking fairly quickly as the sugar around the glass mingled with the rush potato skin salt in my blood stream and the TV droned with a meaningless drivel about the Tour de France, a world-famous bicycle race in a country I've never visited. I almost floated away in peace.
"This part of the planet is way good," I told the waitress for no particular reason, staring in the direction of the TV.
"Is he OK?" she asked my wife.
"Just bring a damp cloth so I can wipe up anything that falls out of his mouth while he's eating," she answered.
