Time Fries!

by Fay Jacobs

  August 2011

  LET THERE BE LIGHT

  Without warning, 7:15 p.m., Monday, August 8, was the day the music died. And everything else electronic. We suffered a blackout.

  What the heck? Was this an isolated incident to drive me insane or was this blackout community wide? Outside, our neighbors wandered about, also wondering what had stopped their lives in their tracks. A car pulled up, with friends reporting that all of Route One, from Lewes to Rehoboth, was blacked out, traffic running amok, cars playing chicken at darkened signals, horns honking and people cursing.

  As the sun quickly set in the West, I panicked. My daily to-do list stood incomplete as Bonnie and I sat quietly in the living room, no hum from the fridge, no TV, no computer, no A/C, dishwasher and laundry mid-cycle, and of course, damn cell phone battery waning. I thought of Simon & Garfunkel. The Sounds of Silence. I didn’t like it one bit.

  Well, at first, it was a relaxing little break. Sitting, talking, laughing, enforced tranquility. I never realized the dog snored that loudly. But then it started getting really, really dark in the house, increasingly warm, a bit spooky, and on my very last nerve.

  Channeling Audrey Hepburn in Wait Until Dark, I rose from my chair, and feeling the walls along the way, went to the bedroom closet to find the battery operated light/radio. Emergency preparedness tip: don’t stash the emergency device in the darkest, most inaccessible crevice in the house.

  Borrowing the Braille method to search for the apparatus, I rummaged through purses last used in 1987, discarded brassieres, and a surprising number of errant golf balls plopping off the shelf (ow, ow, ow). Of course, once located, the radio was without batteries. So I used the hand crank, swiveling my rotator cuff to kingdom come to produce five minutes of radio reception. And I only got our local conservative hate radio. I’d rather be in a news blackout.

  Meanwhile, Bonnie felt her way to the kitchen, found matches and lit a candle. It had an aroma like a Creamsicle ice cream pop. Pretty soon the house was hotter, only a flicker lighter and smelled like a Good Humor truck had exploded.

  Naturally, I started to get the DTs from electronics withdrawal. Couldn’t check e-mail or Facebook. Couldn’t use my dying smart phone, couldn’t write my column, couldn’t watch The Closer (auuggghhh!), couldn’t do a damn thing but obsess over what I couldn’t do. It was not my finest hour.

  “We could play cards by candlelight,” Bonnie said.

  “You mean cards in your hand, not on the computer?”

  “Or, we could go inside and, um, nap.”

  “Are you kidding? It’s 96 degrees in here.”

  “Okay, well just sit there then.”

  So I did, wondering what my Facebook friends were saying, curious if I had e-mail, writing my column in my head. I got pen and paper and scribbled without being able to see, most likely scrawling six sentences atop each other, creating indecipherable hieroglyphics.

  Proceeding to the powder room, I tripped over a Schnauzer who, in turn, tripped over another Schnauzer. It was like wide world of Schnauzer wrestling in here. Finally, I pawed my way to the kitchen for the phone book (remember those?). Between my senior eyesight and the creamsicle glow I felt like Mary Todd Lincoln proofing the Gettysburg Address.

  So I staggered to the antique hard-wired phone and found a dial tone—no lighted dial, mind you, but at least a dial tone. I thought I knew where the numbers were, but first called an exterminator, then a disconnected number. I was verging on completely disconnected myself when I finally got through to Delmarva Power.

  “We estimate service to be restored by 11. We are evaluating the outage in your area.”

  Evaluating? If they’re still evaluating, how do they know when the lights will come on? And what are they evaluating? How long it takes to remove a tractor trailer from a light pole? If Glen Campbell is still a lineman for the county? How many lesbians it takes to change a light bulb?

  My mind wandered. How many lesbians does it take to change a light bulb? One to change the light, two to make organic, free range supper, three to process alternative solutions?

  Hello darkness, my old friend, I’ve come to talk with you again. The vision softly creeping, creeped me out. Deadlines missed, communication cut off. I fidgeted, then cursed and finally, risked letting the cold out of the freezer by opening it for ice cubes. The martini provided only temporary refuge from my panic. My name is Fay Jacobs and I am an electric junkie.

  That’s it. 9:30 and all I can do is go to sleep. So I tried. But there will be no alarm, so what will wake me up? I lay there, wide-eyed, terrified I’d be late for something I wasn’t prepared for anyway because I hadn’t done my work on the computer. Insanity, thy name is Jacobs.

  Then, all of a sudden, my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light that split the night. It came from the hall. Then, I heard it. The air-conditioning. Ahhhhh. And Kyra Sedgwick whining from the TV (yaaay!), and I saw the delicious glow of the telephone number pad. (Wheee!) Everything in the house started blinking, including Bonnie, who had been asleep on the sofa.

  And in the naked light I saw my life return to normal. But the vision that was planted in my brain still remains. Clearly, I hated the sounds of silence.

  So right then and there, I vowed to cut down on my electronic dependence. I would take up Scrabble again and crosswords with a pencil. I would turn over a new leaf and it would be the pages of a paperback book, not an e-reader. No more Facebook dependence. I would make old fashioned phone calls. I would meet people face to face. I would be a recovering tech addict. I would counsel others. I would no longer fear the sounds of silence.

  But, of course, I was curious. What caused the blackout leading to my great epiphany? I ramped up my computer, went to our local news site and discovered the following report:

  “Delmarva Power officials report that the cause of the power outage that hit the Rehoboth area just after 7:30 p.m. and affected over 3800 customers was a dead squirrel found in a transformer box.”

  Clearly, Toto, we’re not in Manhattan anymore. In fact, it appears we are just one squirrel away from Gregorian chants, number two pencils, and subsistence farming. Let there be light. Please.

  August 2011

  WHAT AN E-MESS THIS IS!

  Have you seen me lately, running around like a Perdue chicken with my noggin cut off? That’s me, frantic, clothes wrinkled, gray roots showing, flying around town getting my chores done so I can go to my home office and spend all day, every day, not reading, not writing, but social networking so I can sell books.

  But today I had a flash that hit me like a pail of cold water, which, was actually refreshing because it was 106 degrees out. Nobody’s buying books because they, too, have no time to sit and read or iron or get their roots dyed because they, too, are spending their entire lives social networking.

  UNCLE!!! I cannot Facebook, Twitter, web page, Branch out, or LinkedIn one more time today. I’m having a nervous breakdown and all I can think of is how to describe it in 140 characters or less. I have become seriously unglued and the only cure, as my book publicist says is to “step away from the e-machine,” which is funny because she instructed me to do all this stuff in the first place.

  Frankly, I’ve been social networking for years, writing columns about my life and pretty much being an open book collected in three open books. But, unless there was a point to it, I never stooped to writing I had lox and bagel for lunch or my dog had the trots unless it was part and parcel of a larger, hopefully amusing, story.

  The magnitude of social media messages I get daily about what people are eating, wearing, and sadly, eliminating, is stupefying. What books they are reading, of course, is important, but it is clear to me from the posting that nobody has time for that old fashioned trivial pursuit. Noooo. Now we are tweeting and twirping non-stop, damn the torpedoes full 4G ahead.

  But, thankfully, I had life savers like ice-cold Yeungling and fabulous air conditioning blasting away as I sat, portable e-machine on my lap,
in my cool RV, social networking like my life depended on it.

  Remembering I was at a campground with a pool, I donned my bathing suit and ran over for a short dip but felt guilty. I’m the short dip. I should be working, networking, e-talking, net-blabbing and otherwise surfing for promotional opportunities, not dunking in this delicious pool. Frankly, what I really should be doing is surfing at the beach, which is where I live, after all, but I never see it because I am too busy surfing the freakin’ net.

  Look, I’m capable of creating great feelings of guilt for just about any reason. Hell, it’s in my DNA. But even I know I have reached a new level of manufactured angst with this kind of guilt. Step away from the e-machine.

  So I did. I went out to lunch (No, unlike tweeter freaks, I will not tell you what I ingested). Hell, I’m semi-retired for pity’s sake and I’m guilty going out to lunch? Even chain-gangs get lunch.

  But when I got back, I got yelled at. Not by my publicist, not by my boss (me), but by the graphic of an owl on the Hoot Suite program I use to tweet, twitter, blather, and blog.

  “You have been inactive for over an hour. I was bored, so I decided to take a nap. Let me know when you get back.”

  Jeez, even cartoon owls get to nap. I haven’t had time to nap since kindergarten. I considered not telling the owl I was back, but since I’d failed to tweet for an hour and a half I was afraid the web would put out an all-tweets bulletin on me, declaring me AWOL, MIA or otherwise having left the information highway.

  When I pushed enter to refresh my screen, I could see my Facebook page. And, in the upper right corner was the oddest thing yet. Under the heading Friends You May Know, there was a profile picture of composer Stephen Sondheim, with a note saying You have eight mutual friends. Really? Eight degrees of separation between me and Stephen Sondheim?

  I clicked on the mutual friends and found two people I know who really might be actual friends of the Broadway legend, but six others who, like me, are merely drooling fans. No, I do not believe I should bother to “friend” my pal Stephen.

  And that’s where Facebook gets interesting. When I get a friend request from somebody whose profile says “you have 253 friends in common” I know it’s probably another writer and our mutual readers. Fine. But when I get a request that says you have 12 friends in common, it might sound like a lot, but it’s probably that you both frequent the same dry cleaner. I have so many Facebook friends for the book biz I no longer know who I actually know and who I virtually know. I admit it. I’m an e-mess.

  Which brings me back to my original point. Am I’m destined for the Betty Ford Clinic for tweet addicts? Am I about to be committed for a third degree text offense? All this tweeting and blogging has got to stop. Or at least be put on hiatus. Which is why, as you read this, Bonnie and I have taken off in The Bookmobile for parts North, heading for a quiet, relaxed, cheap and easy vacation. I will allow myself about 45 minutes a day to report to you via the e-machine. Til then…I’m signing off. Over and out, real and virtual friends. The e-machinist has left the building.

  August 2011

  ZIPPITY-DO-DAH

  When my mate suggested we do a zip line through the trees in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, I knew it was way outside my comfort zone, but I had read the brochure. “Family fun. Ages 9 and up. A stunning view over the tree canopy.”

  How bad could it be? I don’t know what I pictured. Maybe a starter zip, a zip line light, a mini-zip. I felt sure we’d be on the bunny slope of zip lines.

  I was buttressed into my gear, complete with helmet and body harness, then lectured on safety by a Paul Bunyan-like 20-year old. Okay, there really were children getting outfitted and their parents weren’t calling 911.

  But when the instructor offered advice about controlling flight speed, reality bit. For me, was the “appropriate clothing” suggested by the brochure a diaper?

  Nervous and weighed down by gear, I toddled off to the zip site. Then the guide said, “For the first zip we will launch from the ground.”

  FIRST?? I saw the enormity of my blunder.

  The guides attached me and my industrial strength canvas harness to a block and tackle pulley system, on a cable between the ground and a teeny tiny platform on a tree a mile down the mountainside. I was about to zip into the next zip code.

  “Stand on this boulder, crouch to a sitting position and gently push off,” said Big Foot the guide. Great, I can’t do squats at the gym and I’m supposed to squat on a rock? I felt like a Sumo wrestler trying for the lotus position.

  “And if you feel yourself spinning right or left, simply turn into the spin, like a car turning into a skid in the snow.” Crap. I never understood that concept.

  I could feel the muscular guide’s open hand on my back, gently suggesting it was time for me to slide my scrunched-up torso off the boulder and down over the trees.

  Zippity-do-daaauuggghhh!!!

  I hit the air, the harness locked to the cable and I was off, semi-squatting, screaming, arms in the air, hanging by my thighs and crotch. What part of the word zip didn’t you understand, you moron? God, don’t let me pee!

  I started to spin, helpless to right myself, zipping backwards toward the tree platform. “Incoming! Incoming!” I howled, sure I’d wipe out the unfortunate mountain man poised to snag me.

  Apparently there was a wood block rigged to stop my forward motion, which, when I hit it, sounded like a gunshot. But no such luck. Unshot, marginally alive, I was passed, like a sack of Idaho potatoes, from one athlete to another to get rigged for a second zip.

  When my spouse landed on the platform behind me, I spat, “I’m going to kill you!” just as the guide instructed me to jump off.

  I gaped at the tree tops below. I was supposed to leap into mid-air, trusting the skinny cable to keep me from free fall? I’d rather die than bungee jump. I can’t even jump into a swimming pool for pity’s sake, much less sky dive! What am I doing here?

  “I can’t do this,” I muttered.

  “You have to,” said Sasquatch. “There’s no other way down.”

  By this time, zippers were piling up behind me as I stared, paralyzed, into the void.

  “But I can’t…Auuggghhh!!!!” Jumped or pushed? We’ll never know.

  What beautiful tree canopy??? With my eyes shut I could have been zipping over the county dump. And it’s funny about gravity. The featherweight nine year olds had time to look around, but this big broad came zipping down the line like a freakin’ space shuttle.

  Zooming into the next outpost, hands in a death grip at the harness holds, praying I wouldn’t kill anybody, I wound up suspended in midair, swinging like a fresh side of beef. I mouthed, “I’m going to kill you” to my mate, who appeared, dangling behind me, refusing to make eye contact.

  Mentally, I filed for divorce as I was once again shuttled between a gaggle of outdoorsmen, who unclipped my cables, re-clipped me to other cables and hinged me to the zip line. Had anyone ever become unhinged? Physically, I mean. I was already mentally unhinged.

  “Get ready for Zip Three!” yelled a bulky teenage guide, who suddenly grabbed me and tightened my harness so thoroughly I wanted to ask if he’d at least buy me dinner first.

  “Off you go!” he hollered, sending me down the mountain at lightning speed. This time I faced forward, and, picking up speed, screamed “Cowabunga!” hoping not to have a coronary. I opened one eye to see trees flying by and a look of terror on the face of the poor schnook waiting to break my fall.

  Thud! I practically flattened him, but he kept us both upright and rigged me for zip four. As I clenched my eyes and prepared for takeoff, I heard him say to the person I was formerly married to, “Things are getting better. This time she didn’t say she was going to kill you.”

  Okay, so I came shrieking in for yet another klutzy crash landing, then had myself shackled and lashed to the line for the final zip. This time, the ride was tricky. I zipped down, then, by gravity, zipped up because the line stretched back
up to a high tree. From there, gravity sent me down again, like a skate-boarder on a half-pipe, not that I’d know from experience. I zipped back up and down two more times like Cirque du Soleil before settling in the middle of the cable, hanging like a pair of underpants on a clothes line. That’s so they could yell “smile!” and take a picture.

  When they got a ladder to offload me, my legs were rubber, my arms felt like lead, and even my hair was clenched. But I was happy to be on the ground, not in it.

  “Well, what did you think?” ventured my spouse. “Are you proud you did it?”

  Truth is, yes, I was proud. Quite pleased with myself, actually. And at least New Hampshire’s motto, Live Free or Die, was not put to the test. And I guess I don’t need a cardiac stress test. Been there, done that. Cowabunga.

  September 2011

  BRING ON THE LOCUSTS…

  Let’s face it, vacations are rejuvenating. Unless you’re away from home during the historic trifecta of environmental events when Rehoboth gets an earthquake, tornado, and hurricane. As a writer, it’s the pits to be out of town, out of touch, and missing the action.

  Luckily, there was not that much action. The earthquake was but a tremble, the hurricane, thankfully, a no-show, and the tornado, while scaring many, mercifully produced no injuries and only property damage. All in all, not bad.

  At word of the earthquake I was in a campground in Ogunquit, ME. We felt nary a shiver. Had I been home, I’m sure I would have run out into the street like Jeannette McDonald in San Francisco, shrieking and singing (although in her case, they were one and the same) “Nearer My God to Thee.”

  When we got news of impending Hurricane Irene, though, Bonnie decided we should head home a few days early to batten our hatches. When I whined, she suggested I batten my hatch and think about the six foot fiberglass dolphin on our stoop that could become airborne. Not to mention the gnomes in our kitsch garden.