Ten things to do during a blackout

As requested…..

I’m a bit different from the most people I work with. I’m older, I don’t chronically masturbate at my desk, I don’t half a half pipe skateboard ramp in my bedroom and my parents weren’t cousins who met at a family reunion who decided it was still “ok.” With age and experience comes a little bit of wisdom I suppose.

A few days ago a guy I work with asked me why I cared about this energy stuff and the government henchmen that are making some seriously bad choices. He said that you can’t fight government and what was the big deal about putting up some wind turbines so that we could be a little bit better to the environment as long as it didn’t cost too much and the hydro continued to magically come out of the wall and magically charge his iPod. It was an honest question posed by somebody who just wanted to learn about a topic I knew a small bit about so I told him.

“Because it’s going to fuck everything up and people are going to lose their fucking jobs and you might be one of them, that’s why! Now go fetch me a Carlsberg!”

The thought of losing his job got his attention, and me a cold beer.

“How the hell are bunch of windmills going to get me fired? It’s not like I’m building them or anything because for sure then I’d be screwed.”

“It’s simple. They suck. They don’t work very well, they keep breaking down, they cost a shedload of money to purchase and maintain, you have to put them somewhere and the land costs money, it’s not like the wind is always blowing so you need fossil fuel burning power plants as back up, the technology of them isn’t nearly as efficient as the makers have claimed so many manufactures of the turbines are laying people off, they make many people physically sick, they’re noisy as hell and the dummy who hatched this bright idea, a guy named George Smitherman who is the deputy premier has said that he doesn’t care what the voters say, he is going to put them wherever he damned well pleases and that the people that actually live there are going to have to deal with it and take a long hard suck on his ass. Oh yeah, and rolling brown outs.”

“Wait, what the hell? That’s messed up. You’re lying about some of that stuff.”

“Nope. All of it is true. This is the governments plan to make things better. They are going to fuck things up and make you pay a privately held company an extra thirty percent every month at least and they are going to do it all with your tax dollars. Go get me another Carlsberg and I’ll tell you how.”

There are two benefits where I work and heavy drinking while being a punishing bastard are both of them. We shared a few Carlsbergs and we pretty much tackled each issue fairly easily. Beer mixed with common sense tends to do that. Maybe we should send a few kegs of it to Queens Park, at least that would be half of the battle won.

The two things he was really shitting himself about was how this could lose him his job, and the rolling brown out. He rightly pointed out that if somebody was enough of an idiot to lease out their land to a turbine company without researching them and they got sick because if it, or it exploded and crashed into his house while he was on the john, then tough shit.

Losing his job was a big deal to him, as it should be to anybody especially in a recession, so we talked about it.

“Okay so check it out. If this guy gets his way, energy costs are going to go up by roughly thirty percent. The people that are just fine with this and want to move ahead and say things like “well, I don’t mind paying a little bit more to do my part for mother earth” are rich guilty white folks. You sure aren’t going to find a poor family that thinks this is a good idea. This will mean that your hydro expensenses will rise thirty percent, so even if that means it is included in your rent, that will increase. It also means the energy bill here at work will increase. If that happens and the economy doesn’t start crapping wealth all over us, somebody might get laid off. It’s happening right now at other companies like Abitibi. It also means that every retailer and service provider will increase their prices by thirty percent. This all means that conceivably you could be laid off, have your rent and cost of living increase and you won’t have a job to pay for the stuff you already have at the current prices.”

“Holy shit.”

“Exactly. Everything that requires energy to manufacture or provide as a service will be more expensive from Big Macs to dildos, you’ll pay more.”

“Is this actually going to happen?”

“It will unless people get educated about it and start making one hell of a racket about it.”

“We’re screwed then aren’t we?”

“Pretty much.”

“Nobody in Canada ever does anything. We’re pussies when it come to standing up for ourselves.”

“You’ve got that right. We’re also horrifyingly ignorant. You’d think in the internet age people would use it for something other than buying each others crap on eBay and downloading spank flicks.”

“Hey don’t knock spank flicks!”

“Nobody is attacking spank flicks!”

“So saving the earth is going to cost people their jobs, and we’re all going to have to eat our house pets.”

“Start fattening up your cat Fluffy.”

“I think I will.”

“What really sucks is, we don’t even need to bother with these idiotic things. We could get rid of carbon emissions easily by just switching to more nuclear power and everything would be fine. People crap themselves about the dangers of it because they’ve been brainwashed. Dumping the left over nuclear gunk down a secure hole works just fine. The earth has all kinds of deadly gasses deep inside of it. If you were to believe these greenpeace geeks about anything then we’d constantly dodging deadly methane geysers and the world would look like fucking Neptune.”

“Yeah but dude, look at what happened in Chernobyl.”

“You mean look at what happened in 1986 in a country that was falling apart and was so ass backwards by that point that workers who hadn’t been paid in months were stripping parts out of the place so they could trade them for handfuls of brown cabbage and goat bladders filled with kitchen sink vodka. These green energy clowns have actually convinced people that we are no better than the Soviet era Ukraine that was using twenty three year old backwards Kremlin technology and poorly at that. Its as ridiculous as banning all cars because of the Ford Pinto.”

“Yeah that is kind of insulting isn’t it. Things are a little bit better now aren’t they?”

“I don’t know if constantly having to dodge people on the sidewalk who insist on texting while they walk like I’m Mohammed Ali could be considered better, but yes, I’d say that the designers of nuclear facilities have figured out a few things since then. They tend to take their jobs rather seriously that way.”

“So what about this blackout stuff?”

“We’ll have more of them. If we were to switch to wind turbines and cost of the other green energy ideas our power would be in jeopardy because they aren’t stable. The sun doesn’t always shine, the wind doesn’t always blow and so on. California has a problem with it right now for this very reason. It gets mighty hot there in the summer so people crank up their air conditioners and put a strain on the power supply and rolling black outs occur. Imagine that same thing happening here, but instead of having to sweat it out over a few beers, it happens in the winter when we use a hell of a lot of electricity. You’d end up burning your skateboard for firewood, and elderly people would keel over. Not to mention the impact it would have on industry.”

“That’d be really bad for people living in rural areas. A power outage in an apartment building is bad enough, but you’d be screwed if you were stranded in the winter.”

“A few years ago there was an ice storm in Quebec and the power went out for days. People died from it. A guy I worked with had his grandfather arrive at his place in the middle of the night because he had burned all of his furniture for heat and couldn’t get food anywhere. He even lost a couple of his toes due to frostbite.”

“Dude that’s seriously not funny.”

“It’s a true story. Now imagine that happening fairly regularly. The impact on people lives and on industry would be horrific.”

“We need to do something about this.”

“I’ve been trying to get a meeting with Smitherman about this and voice my concerns as a taxpaying citizen and his people won’t return my calls.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

“What a douche!”

“No kidding. Hopefully as this moves forward people might start asking questions and doing the same. Go ahead, I dare you. Try to get this guy to return a call and see what happens. Actually, give it a try and see what doesn’t happen.”

So that was pretty much it. We went back to work and I think I actually heard his ass pucker and tighten in terror from across the office. The day rolled on and I continued trying to make the world an angrier place. It did make me think a little bit though. What would we do if confronted with rolling blackouts? Googling stuff wouldn’t work and you can only spend so much time locking yourself in your wig closet freebasing Vicks Vapo Rub before that gets a little boring, so what would we do?

1) You’ll need food and lots of it, especially during the winter. Burning all of your furniture works up a hell of an appetite and you’re going to run out of Cheez-Its pretty damn quick. The best possible thing you can do is to eat a neighbor. You’ll have to move quick, so take advantage of the fact that they are also burning their coffee table so wait until they are hunched over the flame and take them out. Be careful though, they may have read this blog as well and are thinking the same thing about you.

2) Surrender to your impending insanity. Now that you’ve had your first forbidden taste of sweet human flesh, and there will be no reruns of Friends to amuse yourself with, you will more than likely go insane and suffer from a sort of Man Cow disease, which is not to be confused with Mad Cow or PMS. You may be tempted to wear the skin of your neighbor as a dress and Lambada in your flaming living room. This is not the way to go because there will be nobody there to see your display and thus alert to your newly discovered cannibalistic ways. You will need to strip down to your sneakers then clench a dagger into your teeth and run screaming through the street quoting Catcher In The Rye. Before you ask, yes, there is a hint of personal experience in this advice.

3) Take a nice walk and do some looting. By now you are probably all out of Ikea dressers to burn, so dress warmly and take to the streets with the other rioters and forage for fuel to burn. You’ll need to drag your pilferage’s back to your home so try to loot local. You’ll find that Starbucks has lots of lovely wooden things to burn and are available most everywhere. Security won’t be an issue at Starbucks and you’ll find that by simply smashing through the window with an axe and yelling “taste the pain little man, taste the pain!” the barrista won’t offer you much in the form of resistance.

4) Make sure you have plenty of liquids on hand, so rob the LCBO. Hopefully while you were out on your stroll and doing some looting you’ve already though of this and came prepared with an environmentally friendly reusable bag stuffed into the waste band of your raccoon skin wrappings so make sure to pick up some booze to help you wait out the blackout with. The water that comes from your tap has become a brown sludge that resembles the stuff that came out of you on that trip to Mexico when you mistakenly drank some water due to the fact that the treatment plant has shut down. You’ll find that whiskey and brandy works the best to distract you from the fact that your the battery in you iPod is dead so you can’t listen to the latest poser indie band, and also come in handy for soaking torches as fuel and can be easily ignited.

5) Take time for personal reflection. You may notice that have a great deal of time on your hands. Do to the fact there is no internet you haven’t Twittered anything if like…..4Evr, your killing skills have become refined, that mohawk you shaved into your skull with a sharpened human femur bone is looking sharp and the fangs you carved into your teeth to better tear away man-meat from a breast plate are like razors. How will you spend the time? It is probable you are unlike my co-worker who actually took a few moments out of his day to actually learn something so the little portion of sanity you have left is rightfully full of self loathing and remorse. You may be asking your god if you still believe in one why they have forsaken you. You may be wondering how this can happen in the modern age. The best coarse of action in this case is to inflict great harm upon yourself. I suggest finding the nearest right angle and after several gallons of whiskey and a good blast of the meth you are now cooking in your bathroom to use as currency, you smash your head upon it until unconscious. Repeat this action several times until you understand the consequences of your inaction and hear bees.

6) Get creative. By now marshal law has been abandoned and the police force and army have become a roving death squad. You will probably notice that others have formed tribes and you should do the same. Long gone now are the days when you could listen to your battery powered radio for news about the food riots and your flashlight has become the kind of lore that used to be reserved for tales of “I have a friend who works at a hospital and you won’t believe what people get stuck in there” and is otherwise useless. You’ll need to make friends and form a tribe, so bundle up and go for a walk. You will probably find followers in the sewers, which are now ready to burst due to lack of electricity for them to operate.

7) Reduce, reuse and recycle. By now you’ve noticed buildings collapsing. This is what happens when water mains burst and there is no infrastructure to support the weight of a city. You will need to gather your followers and rebuild, making certain that you do not, under any circumstances fall prey to the advice of Starship and attempt to build it on rock n roll. You will have to find bricks, mortar and a sound foundation. As you may have noticed, slogans and jingles don’t work out very well so you’ll need to think things though.

Be the master of your own destiny. By master I naturally mean overlord and master of all that you survey. Assuming you have already begun publicly whipping any dissenters in your tribe and since your kill numbers are in the high hundreds it is time to move up the ladder and take on the ex-police death squads. Have a nice hot meal of soilent green and prepare to release your squirrel army as the first wave of rodent shields. They will keep your troops safe as you begin phase two of “Operation Smitherman.”

9) Plan ahead. It is possible, although unlikely that by now the ozone has stopped burning and clouds no longer explode. Your Great Mounted Caribou Rangers Scouting Squad has returned from patrol from the east and there may be word of a slight breeze. Be prepared for coming change. As their Most Exalted Leader and Omnipotent Stomeperer you must be ready to answer questions about why their god, The Almighty Blue Jay King has decided to end the apocalypse and turn the night lights back on.

10) Roll with the times. Now that power has been restored there isn’t much use for a power mad enslaver of mankind. You may want to call your boss and ask if you can have your old job back, that is assuming you didn’t feast on him during the first few minutes of the blackout.

(editors note; Shortly before the completion of this blog I was subjected to a horror so unimanigable I am still tempted to burn my eyes out. A co-worker inflicted is short-wearing bare legs on humanity today cause everybody to suddenly become atheists and confirm tat which we all knew, that his beard and other body hair is all part of an elaborate prosthetic hoax.)

~ by jeff on May 4, 2009.