Strange lights in the sky on my run this morning.

Double-strange given it was cloudy.

Huffing along between home and the soccer fields, something lit up the street; flickering and flashing like an explosion, electric blue and omnipresent. It cast my shadow in a leaping, stuttering stop-motion in front of me.

I turned, but whatever caused it was gone. Heat lightning? Some distant transformer explosion? Impossible to tell. It struck again a few seconds later, and was accompanied this time by the flickering of the street lights and distant field lights of the soccer fields. And then the light stopped, and did not come again.

No big deal, I guess. When I got home there was no sign that the power had gone out. But what if it had gone out? For a few hours? For a day? A week?

What if the power went out and didn’t come back for years?

(I think there was a show based on this concept; one of those gritty dystopias that were so popular a few years ago.)

I wonder how life on the local level would be disrupted if we had to do without all our electronics, even for just a few days. Or how it would be for the country as a whole.

On the one hand, I almost think it’d be a welcome development. On the other, I don’t know if absolute utter chaos is a strong enough description.