Unplanned Drone

There are various forms of distance, key among them spatial and temporal. A week or so ago, the rain had colluded with fires at key infrastructure outposts to turn off power across the city, especially in our immediate neighborhood, where outages planned and “unplanned” took a wrecking ball to holiday plans. The wind masked the rain, but nature couldn’t entirely overpower the sound of the generators put in place to temporarily serve the area while the nearest substation was out of order. Several of these massive portable machines appeared quite suddenly, and my phone’s meter registered the noise at close to 100 decibels when we walked by to investigate. That was what it was like at the time. Now that the time is at a distance, the generators, while still in place, have been turned off, and the neighborhood is back to quiet, or what passes for quiet in a city. I can summon up memory of the physical discomfort, while the recording manages to retain the sense of shock at what was unfolding.

Recorded on an iPhone 17 Pro on Wednesday, December 24, 2025, in San Francisco's Richmond District near the corner of 24th Avenue and Balboa.