The weather snapped cold here a few days ago. We, along with most of the Midwest and Texas, are experiencing a unique winter storm, one that is bringing -30 degrees windchills. Freezing pipes, rolling blackouts, the works. It’s cold that actually hurts!
Normally when it snows I like to go outside barefoot and feel the cold. It’s a Wim Hof thing. I tried to be cute like that yesterday and thought to myself, “hey dipshit…you might actually get frostbite like this.” So I went back inside.
The rolling blackout hasn’t hit here yet, so I’m trying to crank out this post before the power gets shut off (if it gets shut off…my fingers are crossed). It’s allegedly only for an hour or two, but of course you can find people on Twitter claiming to have been without power for 12 hours.
After having our power out for ~9 days in October, because of that also once-in-a-century freak ice storm, I began to get a taste for what a world without a power grid would look like. It’s all fun and games to imagine the world collapsing and people having to revert back to hunter/gatherer mindsets in order to survive. Something else entirely when your way of life is completely disrupted and you have no backup plan.
All of our food spoiled, we spent way too much money on the hotel, and I ended up driving Rios back and forth to work from her mother’s house…an hour and a half away.
There is something to how reliant we’ve become on our current electrical lives that leaves a ton of ideologies in the dust. Many of them simply would not work, even for the people who champion them the most. It all sounds good up in our heads, but what do we do when the lights flicker off at 9pm, and we were in the middle of baking a chicken in our (electrical) oven, and there was a load of laundry in the washer, and your wife is pregnant and hungry and cold?
It’s not fun, that’s for sure. And that’s why so many ideas from the past three centuries don’t hold weight anymore. We’re different people, now. The hooks are in, so to speak.
And if I’m being honest, my fantasies of living the cabin life in the middle of nowhere (like my dad does) are slowly fading. That doesn’t seem to be the life for me. I can lift weights and eat healthy and be a man, but I fundamentally don’t want to scramble for survival, looking for a can of beans in the wilderness. Few people know this, but there are tons of wild cans of beans out there. Relatively easy to catch!
It would require a complete and total overhaul of my lifestyle, and not just mine but that of my wife and my family. I don’t see how it’s possible.
How do you go back when there are so many elderly people who depend on electricity to live and breathe?
If you’re in this storm right now, please stay warm and be careful. Keep your phone charged.
If you’re in Florida or some shit…fuck you, man! =P
Broken River Blog 