Two nights ago I had a dream, but it was nothing like Martin Luther King when he had a dream. This wasn’t a sex dream either, like the kind where I get tied up in shackles while a giant green blob tries to eat my tall, strapping boyfriend –or maybe that’s Return of the Jedi. Actually this wasn’t a dream at all. It was more of a nightmare.
And it goes something like this. I spend the day typing at my favorite free Wifi spot in the east village. I spend it with Audacia Ray and eventually Jonny joins us too. We spend hours there, being productive, chatting, drinking hot chai. And then we head home. Since I live with Jonny we take separate trains (okay, really, that makes no sense, but it was going to be too obvious a sentence otherwise to say since I live with Jonny, we got on the train together, or maybe I just think it seemed boring but kept it in anyway to change it up a bit).. We get home, and he goes to turn on the lights. And nothing happens.
There is no light, only darkness. And we think, funny, well, not really funny, but strange -three bulbs blew at the same time. We go to turn on the kitchen light. Nothing. The bathroom. Nothing.
Zip.
Zero.
That’s how many lights work in the whole apartment. So Jonny goes to scour the building, to get to the bottom of our lighting dilemma. That brings us to the basement, where the father-in-law of our landlord starts yelling at him in Spanish. In English in translates to, “You didn’t pay your bill, and they shut off your service.” Jonny runs back up to the apartment, where I’m playing with the fuse box, when he blurts out – “Babe, you didn’t pay the electric bill, they took away the meter.”
I pay all the bills on time. With the exception of once, when I had to go to an emergency room in Los Angeles for accidentally pouring cleaning solution (who doesn’t have the combo solution – clean and rinse in this day and age), instead of saline solution, in my eye - not once, but twice, I have always paid my bills. And that time I didn’t even know I had been billed, until it was on my credit report, and then I damn well paid it. I am a stickler for paying my bills. I know he knows I pay the bills, but I also know that this time he doesn’t think I did.
We call the electric company. There’s been a mix up. We apparently live on the fourth floor, even though you only walk up two flights of steps to get to our apartment once you’re in the building, and even though we’re apartment number three. But thanks to the father-in-law’s garden apartment, we are getting screwed. Con Ed thinks we live on the third floor. We’ve been paying bills for the third floor, but nobody has been paying the fourth floor bill. But there’s only one apartment per floor, and four floors in the building, and all bills are being paid, so why is nobody realizing that two apartments are paying the same meter? On top of this, the tenant before us, she never paid her last bill.
The electric company sort of understands this, although the big confusion comes when they have to come back in to restore the meter .Removing the meter means that there’s no switch to flip, and that there’s no way to turn on the electricity until a new meter is installed. They say they’re sending an emergency crew at some point in the evening, but they never show up.
And the truth is, we never sleep. And this is not a dream, or a nightmare, but it’s happening in real time. And finally, yesterday, we get our electricity back, but it’s not over because somebody has to come to the building and do field work, and get to the bottom of this annoying dilemma…It truly is a luxury problem though.
We both realize this, and have a finer appreciate of electricity, because I am very fortunate to live in a place where it’s not supposed to feel like a luxury. But it is. And dreams, nightmares, whatever, I feel the luxury.
And side notes that have nothing to do with the above:
Thanks to Regina Lynn’s wonderful post about my Zug pieces, About.com’s Cory Silverberg gave it a recommendation. He calls it “an inspired effort to examine the true effects of Viagra for women.”
And thanks to Candida Royalle, I’m doing Sirius Radio’s Maxim channel next Wednesday at 2PM.
And I’m hung over, thanks to Catherine and the Moth, but I'm happy. And I am slowly, but surely, writing my day away.