Lights Out? (3)

Woke up to reports of more than 7 million people without power. Wow. I feel your pain, having been without power for days before.

The very fine novelist Bret Lott, with whom I roomed at Bread Loaf when we were fellows there, showed me pictures of his former house in Charleston, SC, after one of the big hurricanes in the early 1990s. If I recall correctly, he was without power for a couple of weeks. Plus there were trees down everywhere and it was pretty difficult to get out by car.

If you depend on electricity for hot water—well, let’s just all agree that cold showers aren’t all that much fun after the first few microseconds.

Mediabistro has a page up for how people can help victims/survivors (those affected in a not-nice way).

For those of us who do have power and no trees down or some other kind of damage, it’s easy to assume that, hey, all is back to normal. In Fairfax County, Va., where I live, there are still four or five schools closed due to powerlessness. So things are not back to normal.

And I guess it’s going to be a while before New York City has wrung out its socks and shaken all the water out of its ears.

According to Mediabistro:

In addition, the New York City Public Advocate’s Office is looking for volunteers to help with clean-up efforts.

So if you’re in New York and don’t have any place better to be, maybe you could slap on your boots and roll up your sleeves and give ’em a hand.

Maybe some Wall Street zillionaires will chip in a few bucks to help get things up and running—seriously, how else is your maid or nanny going to get to work? (I.e. your place.)

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About Steve, i.e., him

Stephen Stark is an award-winning novelist and bestselling ghostwriter. His fiction and nonfiction has appeared in numerous publications, including The New Yorker, the Washington Post, and the New York Times, Poets & Writers and in many other journals. He has been a fellow and taught at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and won an NEA Literature Fellowship in fiction. His novel, Second Son, was a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 1992, and a New and Noteworthy Paperback of 1994.

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