(no subject)

Two nights ago the plumbing in the walls -- from my bathroom to the steam radiator in my bedroom started making horrible banging noises. I've lived in New York for long enough to know from clanging radiators, but it was so much that my floor was shaking.

I didn't find out till the next morning, when nothing came out of my hot water tap, that the boiler was broken. It was a bad day of waiting, till I came home to a warm apartment and optimistic-looking election results.

Since the hurricane I've been carrying around a lot of stress. When they first started closing all the East River bridges and tunnels -- and when they said it was going to be 4-5 days before subway service across the East River came back up -- I really got the feeling, which I usually manage to ignore, that I was on an island and could be cut off really easily from the outside world.

(Something I hadn't realized until just now: I've spent over half my life on bigger and smaller islands. Brooklyn plus Montreal adds up to quite a lot of years, even if you don't count the year on Kyushu or the summer vacation on Vancouver Island. I think climate change is going to make that more... salient.)

It was a very fragile feeling. I figured it was election-related stress but it remains stressy, even after I'm really quite happy with the way things turned out (even more than the presidential election, that a lot of senate races were won either by people I really like -- hi Elizabeth Warren! -- or against people I really don't like.)

Sometimes you just realize to what extent we are all of us in this together.

And everyone's an island edged with sand
A temporary refuge where somebody else can stand
Till the sea that binds us like the forced tide of a blood oath
Will wear it down - dissolve it - recombine it -- Bruce Cockburn, "Night Train"