Contact The Editor
Articles By This Author
The big blow hit New York over the weekend, flooded streets, kayakers paddling through Queens, ocean waves rolling over the pavements of lower Manhattan, onlookers filming the waves and texting the video to relatives in Topeka and Council Bluffs.
The map showed thousands of power outages in surrounding territory, and one could only imagine all the liberal-arts majors in their summer homes having to deal with laptops going dead, having no digital Sunday Times to show, having no TV or hair dryer or coffeemaker and no way to express their ironic introspection via cellphone texts, and do what? Put pencil to paper and keep a journal? Not sure about that.
I'm the son of a Minnesota farm boy who prided himself on self-sufficiency and never paid anyone to do things he could do for himself, fix his car, plow a field, lay a sidewalk, plaster a wall, and here I am, his progeny, living in a building with doormen and a super, which is assisted living, same as the Episcopal Home for the Impaired. I'm on the 12th floor so flooding is no threat but I am thinking about writing an essay about inadequacy and maybe send it to Psychology Today. Naval personnel are riding patrol boats in stormy seas to protect our coasts from infiltration and I, with my B.A. in liberal arts, a navel person, am contemplating my own insignificance against the force of nature.
I am a Midwesterner, not a New Yorker, my sophistication is all pretend, using buzzwords like "pivotā€¯ and "situationalā€¯ and "charismatic predicament.ā€¯ Like many a fellow before me, I was seduced here by a beautiful woman, in my case my wife who loves to look at art and here we are surrounded by a Winslow Homer seascape, and when the nor'easter swung into town, 50-mile-an-hour winds, it caused turbulence in our marriage, and I told her, "I've let you down. I'm not good enough for you. I have diverted you from your true destiny and I must set you free," and she disagreed and said she adored me but not convincingly, it sounded more like fur respect, and so we fell into mutual abject remorse in keeping with the branches tossing, the rain pelting, while off to the west in the hills up the valleys with the Pentecostals, people assumed the violence was the Lord warning us not to tolerate men claiming transsexuality so that suddenly the School Board is talking about the janitor Jeff writing "Priscillaā€¯ on a name tag so he can walk bare-naked through the Girls locker room after badminton practice and take showers with the girls who have girl parts, a prospect that numerous Republicans are raising in the midterm campaigns.
This does not strike me as a critical issue for the electorate.
Frankly, I pity Priscilla if a girl girl goes after him with a towel for a whip. A naked man is vulnerable, and with one good hard snap of the wrist, a girl could put Jeff on the floor clutching his nuggets. I know girls who are capable of this.
No, I think our problem is ignorance of science and reading too much fiction and watching too much TV.
Meanwhile the storm over A.I. is still blowing and the Times keeps dropping ominous omens of circuitry in data centers deep underground going berserk, writing the books, broadcasting the news, surveilling us, running the traffic lights, taking over Taylor Swift and writing songs that crash the stock market and close the schools, but the answer to this is absurdly simple: do we not have power plugs and a lever on the fuse box?
Yes, we do, and when the power grid goes dark, the enemy is defeated, and the 19th century awaits us.
When I was a boy, I spent time up at Grandma's farm while my mother was having additional children, and though it was 1948, her farm was still in the 19th century, with a woodstove, outhouse, hand pump, and kerosene lamps. I remember it as very serene. She baked cornbread and sat at the piano and played "Down in the Valley,ā€¯ which we sang in duet. I read Tennyson aloud to her and she praised my diction. I think I could manage fairly well with no electricity. I'd put aside the essay on inadequacy and write one on sunshininess.
In fact I'll start right now. Do a good deed and wish the next person you see a beautiful day and smile like you really truly mean it. That's the way. Beautiful.
Garrison Keillor is an author and radio personality. His latest book is "Cheerfulness". Buy it at a 54% discount! by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR.