Blackout

On my drive home from work tonight, I was armed with great intentions about writing. I would come up with some silly diversion to post here and then put in some solid work on the screenplay. To go with dinner, I had picked up some bread and arugula and a six-pack of some relatively unimpressive winter white ale, which doesn't really make seasonal sense to me. I guess if you have a stockpile of wheat and oranges in the winter time, then why not. Still, witbier seems like a warm-weather style to me.

Anyway, I was pulling up to one of Chicago's infamous six-corner intersections, and everything went dark.

Now, traffic at these treacherous sites always looks something like this:

Gridlock.

These are busy main roads in the city, and you're almost always likely to contend with CTA bus traffic, insane cab drivers, fearless pedestrians, and loathsome panhandlers. But when the stoplights go out, it quickly devolves into something like this:

Boom!

After I ran over a dozen schoolchildren (why they were out on the street at 7 pm during a blackout, who knows), and got into a gun-battle with some Latin Kings and a few well-armed nuns from the Polish Catholic church around the corner (in spite of this city's stringent ant-gun laws!), I plowed my way through to my house. Where everything was equally dark.

It seemed as though the best laid plans had come unstuck. I sat in the dark with my wife for a half hour waiting for the lights came back on. During that time, we discussed the various possible causes of the darkness. Armageddon. Alien invasion. That we have not yet paid our outrageous electric bill ($180, wtf ComEd?) for the past month. It could be anything. Well, actually I insisted that it was just some random occurrence, and it turned out that I was right. But that's not much fun, is it?

We finally got every candle in the apartment lit, and then the lights came back on. We made some dinner and the world has returned to normal.

Except, I never got around to working on the screenplay. Ain't that a bitch?