A tornado knocked out power on the East Side of Cleveland, which isn’t an irregular occurrence. Since I live a short distance from a Great Lake, I’ll get strong winds to roll in often and do damage.

So power outages shock me not at all.

Normally.

What happened last week was abnormal. It’s one thing to go powerless for half a day, perhaps a full day. Nobody expects winds to halt electricity for seven days. Not since the “Blackout of 2003” have streets darkened like this.

I was in the “heart of darkness,” a phrase that doesn’t overstate the situation. Dark is dark, of course; pitch black is an altogether different darkness.

Other than my house — thanks to a generator my brother and I bought after hearing about the power grids in Texas — none of the rest had power.

Probably no neighbor had a landline, a relic from the last century. The internet didn’t work either. (Bless you, Spectrum!) Unless you had firewood in the backyard, you couldn’t even send smoke signals. My street wasn’t its typical digital desert; it was a communication black hole.

I started to fret about where Cleveland (and America) was with its energy supply. Is our grid so fragile?

A windstorm that came off Lake Erie, not some asteroid, painted the streets in black. It’s a frightful sight, one that makes you wonder how close are we to being in another Stone Age.

Like cavemen, we were disconnected from the outside world.

With tree limbs littering the roads, I had no way of finding out which ones were impassable, what stores were open and stocked or how neighbors the next street over were holding up.

Absent electricity, they couldn’t keep refrigerators cold, and their food was spoiling. Spoiled food translates into lost dollars, and people who live in this ZIP Code can’t afford to lose dollars to spoilage.

With no word from anyone in City Hall, people in the ’hood had to make peace with their circumstances. Worry? What good would worrying do them?

They were isolated from everything, and in the Age of Information, they got none. They heard no word about how long they’d remain in darkness — another hour, another day, a full week?

I wish we could blame someone; we can’t. I wish we could see light ahead of us; we can’t. I wish we could find a way to keep twisters at bay; we can’t.

Sadly, we’re at the mercy of Mother Nature, as fickle an old soul as a man could ever run into. No telling when she’ll revisit something worse on this side of town. In case anybody wondered, things could be worse.

But we didn’t have a Hurricane Katrina or a Debby sticking around. Hurricanes like them don’t make it this far north. All Northeast Ohio had was a typical tornado. Its winds do a different kind of damage, which I saw on streets outside my home.

Now, as I awaited for power to return, I sat in front of my generator-powered iMac and typed. I wanted to share my thoughts about what these powerful winds had done to my East Side neighborhood.

Yet unless you lived on the East Side, you cared not a bit. I guess not caring meant I shouldn’t get into a twist over it.