Re: Wishing the Monk the best

Check in and let us know you're okay when you get a chance, Monk. Looks like it's been a pretty horrific week in your neck of the woods.

His (excellent) blog simply states "closed until further notice."

https://postpunkmonk.com/

Monk wrote on his blog recently that everything's a mess, and no internet/phone, but they're ok. They can't complain, compared to what others went thru. And he adds:

"we are sad to see that the two tickets we’d bought to two different showings of the Eno generative documentary scheduled for this week cannot happen as the arts cinema we’d booked was in the River Arts District… which is no longer there!"

His latest post is more optimistic. He says that he has Internet back, so maybe he'll be chiming in directly. He's in spirits good enough to write about John Foxx's METAMATIC.

If his house were currently bursting into flames while being sucked up into a cyclone, Monk would manage to find the time to write about John Foxx.

It's heartening to have members of the Monastic WrokSteady Cru™ from all over offering their concerns, because it was a walloper that hit Western North Carolina and I didn't have phone or internet from 9-27-24. But we were very lucky in what was a catastrophic event in many areas. The famed 1916 flood highwater marks were surpassed handily. None of us on our mountain road expected power in less than three weeks but it happened in five days. We suspect the tower on the top of our maintain is part of the 911 system, and thus prioritized. The internet came back on Saturday night. We still don't have phone service but with wi-fi back that's not really significant. At least I don't have to worry about water with an artesian well that didn't suffer from flooding in our area.

Asheville is currently nonviable with no water system to speak of. Most of it was over a century old, grossly inadequate to the task [frequent boil alerts were common after heavy rains], and now it's simply gone. Areas five miles east down the road from our district look like wilderness once more.

I made a few comments on the blog in a rare wi-fi zone every now and then. I had board members contact me directly but I didn't have my TP board login credentials on my phone, so that was why I didn't post here yet. I made my first post in over two weeks today as I was at my job with free lunch hour! Okay, okay! So it was a Foxxy post! Is that so wrong? I've none nothing but work hard for over a fortnight. Clearing roads of fallen trees with neighbors, clearing our land, repairing our roof [damaged by a tree crew afterward, not the hurricane - which spared our cars and home] with the aid of a neighbor that builds houses. Then from last Thursday through Sunday, I was at my job on fire, catching up. Which felt like relaxation in comparison.

I've got to say, 30 years living in Florida were hurricane non-events with nary a lost shingle in comparison to the Frances/Ivan one-two punch in 2004 and now the even more drastic Helene 20 years later. In the mountains of Appalachia.

Former TP subscriber [81, 82, 83, 84]

[postpunkmonk.com]
For further rumination on the Fresh New Sound of Yesterday®

Great to hear from you, Monk, and glad you and yours survived relatively unscathed. I also just heard from someone from Asheville, a regular listener to my station, who just posted something in the chat for the first time in a couple weeks. he posted pictures that he’d taken recently showing what a mess the town is in right now. I was telling him how I’d always wanted to visit the Moog Museum., But obviously now is not the time. Still on my list of “cool things I gotta do one day.”