power's

The river, the drums, the bad Chinese food and the view from the Union.

The power's out at the office. The phrase implies so much: 1) power is an entity that has a presence, 2) there is just one power, 3) our dependence on power is greater than we think, 4) the second power is gone, we might as well be gone, 5) regret is a default impulse that fills in a negative space much in the way nature abhors a vacuum and how the laws of thermodynamics are all about how the second there is a place for things (power) to go, it goes there. It is its intrinsic nature to go rushing in there, 6) more specifically, when the power's out, you are suddenly flooded with regret about what you could've been doing - I could be finishing that thing I was supposed to do if the power was on. The absence of power is the most convenient excuse in the world. 7) the duplicity of the apostrophe: is it the obvious that the power is out or a more insidious implication that power's presence is a thing it wields, uses, withholds, utilizes to ultimately create more power?