We had a power outage for a couple of hours here yesterday. What would be fairly minor inconvenience anywhere else becomes a major deal on a 104-degree afternoon. I have actually been very impressed with how few outages we have had in my 9+ years in New Mexico, way less than anywhere else I have ever lived. El Paso Electric seems to know their business, as they would have to in this climate. Any old or ill person or a baby could not go too long without AC in this desert in the Summer with how our homes are built now. We no longer have 3' adobe walls and the coping skills of our ancestors.

I did notice two things unrelated directly the heat. As soon as the power went out there was a hush of quiet. One forgets how we are surrounded by the subliminal hum of the power grid 24/7. I always wonder how all that transmitted energy around us all day can somehow not affect our health, if not physically, mentally for sure. And that is not counting all the radio, cell, TV waves, etc. I took my usual early evening walk, and I could tell exactly when the power was restored just by the ambient hum suddenly starting, like an underlying tension.

The other thing I noticed is how tethered we are to the power grid and technology now. Everyone was outside, kind of stumbling around while frantically pressing buttons on their smart phones trying to get information on the outage. It made you realize that the first thing any invading army will do is knock out the power grid. We are now all partial cyborgs. Kill the grid and you kill part of us.

Perhaps the most telling story from the outage comes from Yesenia, a 16-year-old neighborhood girl I have known since she was 7, and I have never seen her without a smart phone in her hand. They have been part of her life since she was born. I have my own long-term psychological experiment going on right down the block. Right after the power came back on, I ran into her on the street. This was her quote when I asked about the power outage, verbatim: "Wow! My phone came within a couple minutes of dying without a charge and I had all kinds of things going on! I got to get home and charge it up." She said those words with the earnest intensity of a person who had just survived a plane crash in the Amazon jungle. Hey, and before I start to sound too sanctimonious, that two hours without power changed the trajectory of my day pretty good too. You don't miss the water until the well runs dry, and a constant flow of information and technological simulation is the new water.