January 2018 will always be known as the month of The Great Dark. Or The Great Darkness.

The Blackout. The Night of Darkness. The Night of More Darkness Than One Would Expect From a Normal Night.

Anyway, it as both very dark and very dramatic, because the circuit breaker…broke. Or something. I’m not a technical person so I didn’t really know what was happening. I was in my room, composing poetry while Jeremy was snoozing on the windowsill. Then suddenly…everything went dark. It was just after sundown, so most people were still awake. No power, anywhere, all very frightening. I think we’d just hooked up the Club’s main power source to some sort of new thing. Business energy monitoring, or some such contraption. Obviously we probably should’ve gotten the professionals to do it instead of Ingrid throwing her hat in the ring and stating that she could totally do it herself. There wasn’t too much energy monitoring going on when the whole place was all dark, but that’s irony for you. Anyway, the corridors were suddenly full of folks lighting candles, clutching candles and sharing candles. I went out and joined the procession of people going to bang on Ingrid’s door and demand that she fix her energy monitoring scheme before everyone starts getting severe shin injuries. That was when I shared my theory with everyone on industrial solar energy and how it’s better for the planet, but mostly we were all just a bit cranky and annoyed that the air con wasn’t working.

Anyway, after an hour or so of darkness and despair, the power was back on and we’re now looking into both industrial LED lighting and industrial energy storage in Melbourne, just so this never happens again. It gave me quite a bit of inspiration for my poetry though. My next piece is entitled ‘Night of Darker Darkness than Night’, and it chronicles on woman’s journey to fix the power in her apartment building after an astonishing feat of overconfidence.

-Marie