monologue about the emotional demoralizing process of electricity restoration

marked safe from hurricane milton

You may have noticed — and it’s okay if you didn’t, I certainly do not expect you to keep track of my newsletter schedule although *I* keep track of it very faithfully because I pride myself on getting it out every Wednesday at 5 am! — that I didn’t put out a newsletter last week.

I usually write these on Tuesdays, no matter how many times I tell myself I should probably start them earlier, not procrastinate so much. There’s something I like about keeping it a little loose, a little spontaneous. When I tell you about the book I just read, I usually mean like I literally just read it, I closed the cover earlier this afternoon and am still buzzing over the last line. When I tell you that I’m excited about something coming up, it’s because it’s happening tomorrow, or whoops later today because I am writing these with a bit of a future-bent, since there’s a gap of five hours or so between when I hit “schedule to publish” and when it actually hits your inbox. (I don’t do anything with that five hours except sometimes toss and turn, especially if the newsletter is a particularly vulnerable one or if there’s a joke I *know* would’ve been funnier if I’d moved a couple words around.)

I had a newsletter all planned for last week, where I was going to tell you more about this mystery short story I wrote for an Amazon Originals collection, but as I sat down to work on it everything just felt all wrong. We knew Hurricane Milton was coming, we knew it was going to be bad, and it was hard to focus on anything but that — to evacuate or not, stocking up on food and water, is there gas available anywhere?, school closures, what does the 2pm track say, people who haven’t texted me in years: thinking of you are heart emoji you going to evacuate woof it looks bad praying hands emoji they’re saying Tampa they’re saying direct they’re saying unprecedented they’re saying they’re saying they’re saying

And then I didn’t want to write about the storm, either, because the more anxious I get the more inward I get. It’s hard when you have your own anxieties to add other people’s on top of them. I also sometimes get very before-and-after about things, does that make any sense? Like I can’t stand knowing I’m in a before, worrying about what will be after, and thinking that in a few days I’m going to open up this newsletter and see some stupid fucking post chatting about some stupid fucking story¹ and now here I am sitting in the ruins of my house. We can’t always know what’s a before and what’s an after — it fucks me up, if I think about it too hard — but if I ever get that prickly feeling or KNOW I’m potentially in one I try to shut things down. I don’t know if this makes any sense.

(It feels weird to talk about my books here, but this anxiety is very present in The Art of Catching Feelings in particular, like when Daphne is watching past interviews on the TV and present-day Chris just can’t stand to be in the room with Last Year Chris anymore.)

Anyway. I’ve also been procrastinating on writing this newsletter, but I decided I would give myself a total of two hours² just to write about some of my experiences/thoughts/feelings around this storm (I’ve already eaten up 48 minutes of it, believe it or not) and then I would go listen to a podcast and do my Happy Color for a bit and go to bed.

Let me say! my family and I are safe, all told any impact to my house/neighborhood isn’t nearly as bad as it could’ve been, I promise everyone featured in any story in this newsletter is fine!, etc.

One thing about a hurricane: at least you know it’s coming. At least in this day and age, with the technology and science we currently have available to us, and with the institutions whose job it is to track them and report on them (these institutions being something we can’t take for granted in this political climate, but one climate issue at a time please). That’s good, because it gives you some time to prepare — with Milton, the vibe was definitely in the air by the Sunday before, which was overcast and buzzing with an anxiety you could feel like a palpable thing. But that’s the other part of the before that can be tough. You’re just kind of living in this hyper-vigilant state, there’s this dread hanging over you, and all you can do at some point is . . . wait. See where it’s going to hit, and how bad it’s going to be.

I’ve lived in Florida for over 30 years. I’ll tell you one question I’m not going to answer from random fucking people on Twitter is why would anyone live in Florida. Because it’s my home. Because I live here. Next fucking question. Yes, I’m aware of the politics. Yes, I’m aware of the storms. Yes, I’m aware of the heat. It’s my home. Most of the people I love live here. I could never. Then don’t. I’m sorry to come across so angry on this point but I have just about had it with people talking about Florida when they don’t know anything about it. If you live somewhere that you feel is the butt of a national joke I want to promise you that I do not talk shit about your city/state. I am very sensitive on this point.

In the time I’ve lived here, Milton was the worst storm I’ve ever personally experienced, and the fact that it came so soon after Helene (which also caused a lot of damage in this area) was devastating. The winds really did sound like a train driving right next to your house. They ripped a forty-foot tall tree in our backyard right out by the roots. Rain was coming in under our front door. We weren’t even in a mandatory evacuation area, we’re not in a flood zone, but it was still scary.

Because I know the tone of this newsletter is a bit of a bummer (I’m sorry, I’ve been living with all of this in my body for over a week now!), let me lighten the mood a bit by sharing one of my family’s little running jokes during the whole experience. I’m a faithful student of Duolingo — Spanish or vanish, as the threatening Duo búho might say, my streak is at 689 days thank you very much — and my favorite little stories in the app are the ones where Junior (pronouned Yunior, please) advertises one of his new businesses. There’s always a twist to them, where Junior says he’ll help you move but really he just means he’ll throw all your shit out the window, or he says he’ll help clean your house but really he’ll just come over and play video games. And the best part is, his customers give him five stars! “Junior did get all my clothes out fast!” the guy says whose laundry is currently strewn about his lawn, or “Junior playing video games inspired ME to clean and the house was done in no time!” These stories make me ACTUALLY jajajaja I’m not ashamed to admit it! God bless Junior’s entrepreneurial spirit!

So we kept referencing Junior, like how it must’ve been Junior’s new cleaning company mopping our floor with the water coming in or Junior’s Tree Service leaving this giant tree half-leaning in our backyard (away from the house, thankfully). I don’t know, man, maybe it’s gallows humor or maybe you had to be there, but I really was getting a kick out of Junior.

(I want to give a brief shoutout to Ella Dawson, my Duo Friends Quest partner during this trying time, who stepped up to complete our quest and dropped me an XP boost as a gift. This meant a possibly weird amount to me. It really touched me. Her debut But How Are You, Really is so clearly written by the kind of person with the sensitivity to step up during a Friends Quest and send an XP boost, on a sentence level, and I think about Reece + Charlotte all the time.)

The storm was its worst from about 9pm - 11:30pm or so, and once it seemed like it was calming down I tried to lie down in the hot, dark house and see if I could get some sleep. But it was hard, so instead I was doom-scrolling through any social media I could get to load, trying to catch updates from other friends in the area or respond to messages checking in.

And that’s when I saw the news that the Trop roof had come off in the storm. Which, look, is just kind of a terrifying image, especially when I’d seen pictures earlier that week of how they’d set up rows and rows of cots inside to set up first responders coming in from out of state. (From what I’ve been able to find, no one was hurt when the roof came off, thank god!). It’s also just an incredibly sad image. It’s not the worst of the devastation to the area by far, but there’s a lot of memories and symbolism and pride wrapped up in that building for me and for a lot of people, okay? So when I saw the comments on this post saying shit about oh no not the Wild Card banners and good thing there wasn’t a game on or dozens or fans would’ve been hurt or haha looks like the Rays will get a new stadium before the A’s do (sharing this last one to show the sheer IGNORANCE because imagine not even knowing a single goddamn thing you’re talking about!!!) —

I mean. This is the kind of shit that’s been making me so angry this past week. It’s bad enough to deal with the stress of the storm and the weight of climate grief and the ways our governor continues to let us down and everything else without having to see JudgeJabroni99’s tired jokes when he could just refresh his negative DraftKings balance and mind his own fucking business.

There have been a lot of good interactions, too, though. Ways I’ve seen neighbors really coming together and looking out for each other. The title for this newsletter comes in part from a local social media post that just delighted me — Charles Dickens alive and well on Next Door, folks! It went:

. . . the negligence of time and emotional demoralizing process of electricity restoration take a toll. That’s beautiful! And look, “emotional demoralizing process” is right, it sucks to be without power for several days ranging from an inconvenience to potentially more serious issues depending on your needs, but I really was so thankful for the linemen who came from Missouri, Illinois, Ohio, who were working around the clock, some of whom literally were getting rides to Orlando at 11:30pm only to wake back up at 4:30am the next morning to be bussed back out. Everyone we talked to was so nice.

A couple nights after the storm, we ran up to a local pizza place which had opened with a limited menu (the manager’s hot take: “As far as I’m concerned, it should be like this all the time, we have too much stuff on there”) to get pizzas for us and a few other houses on the block. There was a woman in a motorized wheelchair also waiting on her pizza, and she talked about the flooding in her house, her niece who was a single mom and had lost everything. “I’m 66 years old,” she said. “I’ve been paralyzed for 40 years. And this was the first time I ever felt truly helpless.” When we drove home, we passed by the park where we always took our kids, where we’ve had countless birthday parties and playdates, that we would call “The Tree Park” because, well, it had a lot of trees. Now, half the trees were down, and the playground equipment was sticking up over what looked like a swamp. My friend told me a story about a squirrel she saw on the ground that she thought had died, and then later one of her neighbors told her, “Oh, that guy? He was just stunned. I built him a little nest in a tree and up he went.”

It’s been a week, is what I’m trying to say. Rebecca Solnit once said “people in disasters live in an intensified present” and that’s certainly what it’s felt like. I’m grieving a lot of things, I’m very grateful for a lot of things, I’m still figuring out all the ways we need to rebuild and what I can do to help. If you’ve read this far, I appreciate you and I hope you’re safe. 💜

In place of my usual “Currently . . .” sections, let me just tell you about my hyperfixation during the storm, which I think was no coincidence given that it was helpful at times FOR PERSPECTIVE to think, well . . . at least it’s not Chernobyl?

Midnight in Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham - I listened to the audiobook for this one and it was very thorough and informative. It starts with a list of the major players, and I do wonder if it would be better in a physical format for that resource alone, because there were a few times when names sounded similar or I couldn’t keep track of who was who. But then again, there was something oddly restful about just the listing of names, I literally considered using it as a sleep aid when I was having trouble sleeping after the storm. Anatoly Dyatlov, deputy chief engineer . . . Leonid Toptunov, senior reactor control chief engineer . . .

Chernobyl the HBO show - We’ve been getting a lot of mileage out of the tagline “What is the cost of lies?” It’s fun to say about anything. Jared Harris is so good (as he always is, I think he’s underrated even if he’s a very decorated actor, I’m a big fan of his from The Expanse and Mad Men among other projects) and the show LOOKS incredible, it just really puts you there. I also thought there were a lot of really interesting writing choices being made, in the narrative ordering of events or changes they made to characters from real life, that kind of thing. I could talk about this for hours, which is why it was good that they made the —

Chernobyl podcast - Creator/writer/producer Craig Mazin talks about each episode more specifically and gives lots of cool behind-the-scenes information on casting choices, historical research, places they differed from the history and why, etc. I spent a LONG few years listening to the Scriptnotes podcast co-hosted by Craig with fellow screenwriter John August, and I was kinda surprised by how comforting I found it just to listen to his voice again. I felt such affection while listening to the show, like catching up with an old friend.

Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich, translated by Keith Gessen - I’m going to be honest. This book was probably a mistake, in my fragile state. It is dark. Like, it is beautiful in many ways and I think absolutely necessary if you ever did want to understand the full scope of Chernobyl and its aftermath, but it is DARK. The chapters have headings like “Monologue About How the Frightening Things in Life Happen Quietly and Naturally,” which is the other part of how I titled this newsletter. There are sentences from this book I don’t think I’ll ever forget.

Chernobyl Strawberries by Vesna Goldsworthy - I would classify this mostly as a cancer memoir, if anything, and it contains a lot of interesting reflections and observations from someone who grew up in what was then Yugoslavia. Honestly, I would assign the foreword from the tenth anniversary edition in any creative nonfiction class — I think it has a lot to say about memoir writing, the way we “fix” a memory in place by writing it down, the way we create “characters” out of real people who live outside the pages of the book and have their own perspectives on the same events, the way we explore and define our own identities through the act of writing and the way we can look back on those events like they happened to someone else. I don’t even know, it was a helluva foreword.

1. I quite like my story actually! But you get it.

2. It ended up being more like 3 hours, for full transparency.