Anybody got a candle? Thanks. How bout a lighter?
Wouldn't you know it, just when I sit down to write today's column, Elkhorn goes dark. It started with Elkhorn goes dim, then a little dimmer, then no glow at all. The power is out.
It's been out nearly thirty minutes at this point which counts as an extended outage downtown. It's not that big a deal for hammering words out as long as the battery lasts, but the cable modem and router need electricity to get me to the internet.
You might be surprised, but the weekly drivel does not arrive whole cloth out of my pea brain. I do not make this up. At least not the important parts.
The point is I spend at least an hour searching and researching while writing the column every Wednesday but tonight I can't even double check the online dictionary to make sure I used whole cloth right, which is what I wanted to do the second my bull headed fingers typed it out.
For instance, the plan tonight was to go into some Kendrick Lamar lyrics to help some of you come to terms with that Super Bowl halftime performance. Not saying I was singing along, but I felt like he was putting something down I needed to hear. And who doesn't like Samuel L. Jackson?
But here I am in the dark and I can't google hidden meanings and visual clues at Super Bowls and the work of Kendrick Lamar. So I'll just leave it with he won a Pulitzer Prize for Music which is something no one else in your playlist has done, I promise. It might be worth another look.
When the power comes back on. If it does.
The thing about the power being out is, you really don't know how far the circle of powerlessness goes. Is this just an Elkhorn thing? Is it all Pike county? Or does this loss of power extend far beyond the normal blackout. For all I know, Elon might have decided he needed Kentucky Power's power a lot more than Kentucky did.
I mean, really, how could somebody in the dark know any different? Getting rid of all those government employees, something Viscount Musk has sworn to do, has to take a lot of energy. There must be way more federal employees than there ever has been. Right?
If only I could research that. What if googling the number of federal employees showed the number was the lowest percentage of the U.S. workforce in 85 years? What if it was less than 2% of the entire United States' workforce?
Knowing something like that would probably make you wonder what he was up to. Surely these departments he wants to get rid of aren't the only things standing between him and a trillion or so of your tax dollars. Would the Republican party let that happen?
I don't need google to know Elon owns enough of the Grand Old Party to make it worthless to anyone in 98% of tax brackets. I've got a candle, I'm not completely in the dark.