Monday Morning Blue Screen of Death & Other Signs of the Apocalypse

Error Code: 0x5000d64. That can't be good.

This morning I was greeted with the infamous 'Blue Screen of Death' when I logged in to my work station. And for the next hour while IT looked into my shit, I was powerless, paralyzed, gun shy that here was notice the general abundance of chaos and bad news had finally trickled down to the level of the you and the me.

This on the ominous heels of yesterday's blackout in my building after I'd just come home with a couple hundred bucks worth of groceries that required refrigeration and couldn't keep my meat, cheese and other perishables chilly amidst the onslaught of the hottest summer in history.

And I kept ruminating on how fragile we are and how dependent on each other and the technical advances we somehow manage to keep up to make our standard of living possible. What would I know if asked to fix the power grid? Sad to say without PECO I'd be sweating it out by candle-light eating what nuts, berries and vermin I'd be lucky enough to scrounge.

In the 100 degree heat on Saturday, as another example of my existential thinking lately, I'd remarked to CW that it's amazing what a thin band of temperature we can tolerate as human beings, where 32 is cold and 92 is hot. That's a mere 60 degrees difference and it's so important and makes us seem like wimps (and/or miracles) if you take a cosmic view of toughness. On Mercury the temperature swings from -300 to 800 degrees Fahrenheit between night and day.

To which he said, 'well, we're so much more complicated than rocks.'