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Supersuckers Country Western Extravaganza, with Jessie Dayton

Ice storms Wednesday night left about 1.5 million Duke Power customers in North Carolina without power, including yours truly, leaving us all "frozen in time". Yeah that sounds like a corny news report or something, but the clock on the Century Center in Carrboro down the street from where I live literally stopped at 5:27 am. It's Saturday afternoon as I write this from UNC's Davis Library, and we haven't had power at home since Wednesday night. We do have water and phone, but no heat or electricity, which is just a minor inconvience compared to some other people.

Wednesday night around 2 or 3 am we heard popping noises outside and a blue glow like lightning came through the window. That was the transformer on the telephone poll in the back of our row shorting out, due to a tree falling on it from being weighed down by ice. Thursday morning I woke up at 7am to walk to work like I usually do. Everything was totally covered in ice. It looked like Superman's secret hideout. There was no power whatsoever in the town of Carrboro, as well as Chapel Hill, I imagine. A tree in front of a row of storefronts across the street from me broke at the trunk and fell over. (Today there was a couple chainsawing it for firewood). Icicles hung from all powerlines, telephone pools, signs. Limbs were in the street, small trees were completely bowed to the ground, completely covered in ice.

I arrived at work (only two blocks from my house) and the building was completely dark. I was pissed and went home. We listened to reports on a walkman (before we discovered there were batteries in the boom box, our main source of entertainment now). 1.5 million people without power. Duke Power's biggest ice storm in history. Twice as many people without power as Hurricane Hugo, which took 2 weeks to fully restore. They now estimate most people will get power back by the evening of Wednesday, Dec. 11.

Power is really an unnessicary thing to begin with, other than making our furnace work, and keeping food frozen, so we can do without that. We went without heat up until about 2 and a half weeks ago anyway, to save money on the gas bill, so we've had some cold nights. Last night was the coldest, so we just wore more clothes and used more blankets and sleeping bags. It's really not that much of an inconvenience. In fact I don't even want to turn the fucking gas back on. It's just another useless bill, especially in NC where the coldest it usually gets in the winter is the teens, and that's only at night.

Food's been a minor inconvience. We have a bunch of frozen seafood in our freezer since Joann's dad is a fisherman in Maine. Everything kept frozen until Friday morning. Last night we just put everthing outside and this morning I filled a five gallon bucket with ice and a couple bags and now we're treating our freezer like an old time icebox, so the food stays frozen in there in the day when temperatures are in the upper 40s outside. For a fridge we just keep everything in the cooler on the front porch.

Last night we cooked out on the good old charcoal grill. I've been trying to perfect a way, with my spare time, to boil water without a stove or enough dry wood to start a fire, to make coffee and tea and maybe even hot soup. I've been drinking one cup of hot coffee a day, purchased at the local market. Yesterday I took one of Joann's big fat three-wicked candles and carved a hole out of it big enough to fit a metal cup in there, drilled holes in the side with a corkscrew for the wax to pour out and lit the wicks, filled the cup up with water and set it on there. It took a while and in the end it was taking too long and I got the water to steam but it probably would have taken the whole damn candle to boil it. Today I tried to rig up a stove using a citronella torch, a camping pot, a stick and a huge rock but that turned out not to be such a good idea. At least I had the sense not to do this outdoors. A doctor at UNC hospitals was interviewed on the radio and he said he treated at least 20 people for carbon monoxide poisoning because idiots are brining their gas grills inside and not ventilating anything. One kid in Anson County died because he was refilling a kerosene heat that was left on.

Shelters are opening up all around here for wusses who can't take the cold and also for people who actually need to go to shelters like people without water, people who rely on oxygen tanks and the elderly and people with little babies. Joann work's at a grocery store which has been open despite their lack of power and having to throw tons of perishable food away. She comes home with stories about people whining that they don't take credit cards. Fuckin Christ people. I heard one lady interviewed on the radio say "We can't even charge our cell phones. This is terrible." Exact words. I sincerely hope that bitch freezes to death. While turd lickers like her are "coping" with thier comfort addiction, there are old people and babies and people on oxygen trapped in their homes because there are power lines and trees in their road, wondering how long their back-up tank is going to hold up and whether they'll survive.

You won't hear about those people in the news though. There are plenty of people volunteering and all that shit and doing good shit for other people. You'll hear about them so I don't even have to go into it.

Last night I went out to look around and it was as dark as in the desert at night. The only lights were the lights of cars of people driving around looking for supplies or just keeping warm. Our neighbor, who bartends at a bar called Ringside in Durham, said that Durham looks like a war zone. It's a eerie thing, he said, to drive down the highway expecting to see the city lights and it's pitch black. The stats were something like 300,000 out of 310,000 Duke Power customers in Durham were without power. There's a curfew there from 5pm to 6am to prevent looting and there's a restriction on the sale of alcohol, which is a damn sin and I'm glad I don't live in Durham.

I like this though. I don't like seeing people with handicapps and special needs and infants and whatnot being inconvenienced, but there's nothing better than seeing rich comfort-addicts squirm while I enjoy surviving. Being without the elements will be good for people. I'm finding that the less you depend on technology and companies for comfort, food, warmth, etc., the better survival skills you have. People who camp a lot are doing just fine and dandy now. Joann has a 20 degree weather sleeping bag. I wish we had a camp stove. I know how to make one out of a tuna can and some foil but I don't feel like shelling out the cash for the fuel. I have to save my pennies for the bills next month since I missed 16 hours of work this week.

The Ice Storm of 2002 (or whatever the hell they will call it on the annoying TV news, when the "Accuweather Team" is patting themselves on the back for being the ones with the most detailed coverage, God I'm never watching TV again) is the exact reason why, when I move out to the country, I want a fully independent household. Solar power, biodiesel, wood stove, and guns. Amish people aren't as devastated by things like this. It's all about Independence, baby.

12/7/02