How I survived the solar flares and stayed sane

The Column: 05.17.24

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The geomagnetic storm caused by solar flares that hit Earth last week and triggered the Northern Lights and threatened to disrupt telecommunications and knock out power grids made me a little paranoid, sitting in a 12th-floor apartment in Manhattan, imagining my laptop computer getting fried, smoke pouring from the keyboard, and my novel-in-progress turned to ashes as well as my entire life’s work, leaving me to spend my remaining years in regret, but perhaps not many years would remain, perhaps the flares (which emanate from a sunspot 17 times the size of Earth) would also trigger thermonuclear war and within three hours Earth would be just another roasted planet like Mercury and Venus.

I worried about nuclear war as a child. In grade school, we practiced ducking under our desks in case of a nuclear attack but it only made us question the intelligence of our principal, Mr. Lewis. A nuclear bomb makes a deep crater, and ducking under a desk doesn’t change that nor is it protection against radioactive dust clouds. I’m sure the danger of nuclear war is very real and the prospect is horrendous but how long can you go on worrying over it? You move on to other things such as the prospect of electing a 78-year-old con man from Queens to high office. Didn’t we do that already? Why would we try it again?

We live in an Age of Disgruntlement and when I dine with grumpy people, I listen to their gripes and when they stop to take a breath I talk about the great progress made in my lifetime, which of course irks them no end. For one thing, the cash card. We used to go into the bank and hand a check for cash to Mildred the teller with her pert hairstyle and starched blouse, her specs hanging on a chain around her neck, and she’d wrinkle her mouth and peruse the check, questioning the wisdom of handing you money, and eventually she’d count out your thirty dollars and say, “Now don’t go spending it all in one place.” And now there are ATMs everywhere you look and you slide in the card and get $300, no look of disapproval.

The laptop computer. You can throw away all of your old 45s, the old hits are all on YouTube, you just type it in the browser and you’ve got Danny and the Juniors singing “Let’s go to the hop (Oh, baby), let’s go to the hop (Oh, baby).” The iPhone. You forget who Natalie Wood’s costar in “Splendor in the Grass” was; no need to agonize over it with other seniors and ruin your lunch at Burger King, you just pull out your phone, google, and of course it’s Warren Beatty. William Inge wrote the screenplay, the movie is set in Kansas, the title comes from Wordsworth. Next question?

Thanks to modern electronics there is probably no need to ever leave your room ever again. Have the deli send over a Reuben and onion rings, order a bottle of vodka from Acme Liquors. Everybody delivers, even proctologists — just FaceTime him, drop trou, and sit on the phone, it’s called a butt call. You can get the news from the QAnon website, listen to the Ronettes, Marvelettes, Brunettes to your heart’s content. You can even do your job from home. Live your life in your PJs. You can talk to yourself, just as I’m doing now.

I’m a writer, working solo in a quiet room but I dread isolation, and the beauty of life in New York is that I can walk out on the street and be in a flow of people, board the subway and experience diversity for real. If someone looks at me, I can talk to them. A flock of high school kids — “Where you off to?” They’re going to MoMA, to see Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night. I step into a coffee shop, buy a tall latte, pay for it, put a tip in the tip jar, and the guy says, “Thank you, my friend.” Which makes me unaccountably happy. Van Gogh painted the night sky while in an asylum, shortly after he cut off his ear, a year before he committed suicide. No need to tell the kids all that. Enjoy your day, kids. Look at the Monets too. Walk tall. Don’t duck. Be beautiful. Let’s hop in the van, oh, baby, and do not drive too slow. Step on the gas, man, and make this van go.

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