One block from my home last night, manholes were exploding, fire engines were wailing, Con Ed was working. Oblivious to all of this and having finished my third beer of the night, it seemed like a good time to pick up the laundry. Expecting a quick jaunt to "sweetheart", my laundry lady, instead there was a departure to an eerily quiet landscape with a crowd of 50 onlookers.
Half checking out the scene, half looking for people that I knew, and half looking for people that I might want to know I wandered over. The big action had already passed and the denouement was rather dull. Seeing no one from whom I would want to learn what had happened, I left not really knowing what the fuss was about, but secure in the fact that it wasn't going to affect me.
Onward to the laundry, my neighbor/friend Joshie (pronounced with a hard 'o' - it's foreign or something) appears. Dragging him into the laundry with me, handbag-style, I get all of the details of the explosions, the curtailed subway trains, the fires and the blackouts.
"So much happens outside when you're inside, just drinking some Buds and luxuriating in your air conditioning," I tell him, garnering a warning from him that non-essential appliances should be curtailed.
"But air conditioning is kind of necessary, right?" I ask.
He answers, "Well, yeah, totally."
