Alone in the Dark

It's a blackout night. Power went out awhile ago. I like a good outtage now and then. It makes the world go away for a little while. I’d love to be in one of those all-out monstrous metropolitan BLACKouts sometime. It’d be freaky, but you know what? Who cares. It’s all about chalking another notch on the wall, isn’t it? “And I did THAT, too.”

I was attempting to write on my balcony before this, seeing as I've got a laptop and it was the perfect time to both make use of it and show off. I was out there listening to tunes, checkin’ out the moon and stars. The air’s rich tonight. There’s a faint waft of rosemary from my herbs, which makes it seem a little less the urban overlook that it really is, but then there’s the apartment block across the way, and that always brings home the brutal reality that I just ain’t got a stitch of privacy.

There’s a guy across the way who’s a really nice dude, 42, a friend of a friend of a friend sort of thing, but he’s also the guy I affectionately refer to as “Hairy-Backed Artist.” He’s kind of my “Naked Fat Guy,” like the infamous character in Friends, and my friends and I all discuss both the artist and the oh-so-'80s abstract art he creates (and of which Bill Gates owns at least one original, as of last June).

HBA and I have encountered each other at parties and such and it’s always awkward on my end since this is a guy who probably has a pretty intimate knowledge about my life, considering he looks down from half a floor above and 60 feet away into my crazy little hovel, and considering I enjoy actual sunlight and open my curtains all the time.

So it was only natural that HBA should shout out to me from his balcony when he saw me during the blackout. (Oddly, my building goes out and the four southwest apartments [including his] in HBA’s building go out, but the rest of the street is fine.)

Unfortunately, the endless drone of cars amping up for the freeway via Oak was at its finest, and I could barely hear HBA. We agreed to kind of ignore each other and go back to our respective things. I took a seat in my director’s chair, got into my laptop, and suddenly dude decides he’s going to garden. (He had been cleaning his apartment up.)

Now, there I was: A guy standing on a deck in front of me in near-zero temperatures, wearing only a wifebeater, with tufts of hair all over his upperbody visible from 60 feet away in street/moonlight, as he pruned his little potted plants by flashlight.

Yeah. It was a little weird. So, I’m indoors now. Still liking the outtage, though.

(The power’s been out 2 hours now and I just saw the Hydro truck pull up in the alley. Nice. But then again, I never phoned it in. Serves me right, yeah?)