Sample Reality

In Madrid…

Sorry, but it’s going to be hard to blog for a while. I’m in Madrid. Plenty of internet cafes around, but it’s not so easy to bring a 1-year old toddler along with me as I spend hours composing deep, reflective posts (yeah, right, that’s what my posts are). Plus, I don’t have any easy way to upload photographs, so I don’t even have any way to share good photos of the trip.

I’ll try to comment on anything interesting that happens, but until jet lag subsides, even that’s going to be a challenge.

For now you’ll have to content yourself with the knowledge that a 1-year old can produce mucho mucho v?mito when airsickness strikes in the last ten minutes of a transatlantic flight.

Warning!! Stay Indoors

And here is more from my McGuire Emergency Planning Calendar, mailed by the nuclear family of Duke Power to every local resident just in case.

My very own evacuation strategy!

Three things I might be told to do? (1) Stay indoors (2) Run for the hills Evacuate (3) Take potassium iodide (KI).

Hmm, I think’s Option #2, all the way.

Warning!! Unusual Event!!

My Emergency Planning Calendar from the local nuclear power plant includes many helpful reminders, such as:

• Martin Luther King Day is January 17;
• March 20 is the first day of spring;
• Father’s Day is right around the corner on June 19;
• July 5 sees the emergency siren test at 11:50 AM;
• And “there are four classifications used to describe a nuclear station emergency” at McGuire.

On the right you can see these four classifications. I love the language Duke Power uses here, especially for the first order of emergency: “An Unusual Event.” According to Duke,

An Unusual Event is the least serious of the four classifications. It means there is a minor problem at the station. Because of strict federal regulations, a number of problems are reported as Unusual Events even though they pose no danger to the public.

First of all, do they have to capitalize the “U” and “E”? Any event becomes Unusual when capitalized!!

Secondly, I can’t help wondering whether these Unusual Events really “pose no danger to the public.” You’d think that after White Noise, in which an Airborne Toxic Event plays a major role, power companies would be wary of using the word “Event” to describe any, well, event.

Warning!! Emergency Planning Calendar!!

I know it’s not July yet, but I wanted to share this lovely photograph of a local watershed, found on the July page of a calendar that I received in the mail, free, a few months ago.

Who could be sending out these gorgeous free calendars to all the area residents? Why, Duke Power, of course.

I’ve already mentioned my friendly local nuclear power plant owned and operated by Duke Power. Merely as a friendly reminder that my neighbors and I should have our evacuation routes memorized, Duke mails these calendars out every year.

On the cover is a nice panoramic view of McGuire Nuclear Power Station. I’ve got to say, I’m not too impressed with those cooling towers. They’re short and squat, like smooshed grain silos. They’re nothing like the technologically sublime nuclear plants of my childhood, spewing steam from towering hourglass concrete structures.

Like, say, Three Mile Island.

Now that was a nuclear reactor. Incidentally, this oblique aerial photograph of TMI comes from President Carter’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island—whose report of the “accident” (i.e. your run-of-the-mill everyday partial core meltdown) is housed at the National Archives and Records Administration and mirrored on Stellar-One. I bet Metropolitan Edison, the operator of TMI back then, didn’t send out free calendars.

Suburbia: The Unspeakable Peril in the Everyday

All this thinking about the dangers of suburbia reminds me of a passage from Joan Didion’s great 1970 novel Play It As It Lays. Maria Wyeth, the washed-up, strung-out actress in the novel exists in a near catatonic state.

For days during the rain she did not speak out loud or read a newspaper. She could not read newspapers because certain stories leapt at her from the page: the four-year-olds in the abandoned refrigerator, the tea party with Purex, the infant in the driveway, rattlesnake in the playpen, the peril, unspeakable peril, in the everyday. (Play It As It Lays, pp. 99-100)

This peril in the everyday is the ghost anxiety that haunts many of the signs in my subdivision. Notice in how many of them children are at risk.

Because her own child is somehow brain damaged—and she aborts another fetus—Maria keys into this societal fear of children at risk. But she (ironically, considering her decidedly non-nurturing lifestyle) localizes the fear as a mother’s concern for her child, thereby depoliticizing what I see as a symptom of larger social anxieties:

She grew faint as the processions swept before her, the children alive when last scolded, dead when next seen, the children in the locked car burning, the little faces, helpless screams. The mothers were always reported to be under sedation. In the whole world there was not as much sedation as there was instantaneous peril. (Play It As It Lays, p. 100)

Instantaneous peril, or at least the imagined threat of instantaneous peril, what role does it play in our lives? In our decision-making? In our policies and politics, both locally, here in my own subdivision, and nationally, in an America where our greatest living enemy is supposedly some untangible capital-T Terror?

Warning!! Duke Power!!

Here’s a common sight in my neighborhood: a locked utility box. I’ve already posted on a similar box powered by Energy United. This one is Duke Power.

The warning is pretty straightforwardly lethal. The scary killer lightning windmill guy says it all.

I guess all these transformer boxes are a result of the electrical wiring for the subdivision being hidden, buried underground. In the neighborhood where I grew up (which we called an allotment—it wasn’t until college that I encountered the word “subdivision”), all the power cables were strung on telephone poles running alongside the streets. Not as pretty as them being, well, not there, but it definitely gave the birds a place to hang out.

Warning!! Playground Jungle Gym!!

Continuing my series of posts on Danger in Suburbia, I want to highlight another lurking horror on the playground in my subdivision. Here is a sturdy metal and PVC slide/tunnel jungle gym, with a warning sticker posted in several places on the equipment: “Warning: Installation…may result in serious injury or death…” [Original sticker text edited for brevity and shock value.]

Any warning with “death” in it definitely ranks high on the Suburban Danger scale.

Terror hides everywhere. No wonder we declared war on it.