Charged Atmosphere for Thinking About Power

A while back, I took my aching back to the doctor, who sent me to the back guy, who sent me to the physical therapist, a nice lady who stretched me out and beat me up and finally hooked me to the kind of machine that has made Turkish prison a good place to avoid.

It’s a device with a dial and electrodes that they stick at spots right over the path of one’s long-suffering nerve, from the base of the back to a place all the way down behind the left ankle. When they turn the dial, electricity races through your body, much as it did through the patched-together creation of Dr. Frankenstein. Here and there, your muscles quiver like hummingbird wings.

So there I was, FrankenSteve, lying on an ice pack, enjoying the dance of the electrons--the watt-usi, perhaps?--when I was blinded by a sudden realization: For 10 minutes, I had been more than just another pathetic Californian sucking energy from the state’s desperately strained power grid. In fact, I had become a piece of this grid that everyone is talking about, a brother to the transmission line and the power pole, a cousin to the toaster.

It was an electric moment.

Emergency electrons brought in from Seattle just hours before were coursing through my bloodstream, demanding coffee. Down around my knee, Canadian electrons were asking politely which way was oot; exhausted, their California counterparts moaned and groaned about the rain and deregulation.

All in all, though, we had a lovely time, with electrons ricocheting from tendon to tendon and me thinking deep, crisis-like thoughts.

Like: Isn’t electricity overrated in the first place? Brushing their teeth with hog bristles instead of Water-Piks, the Founding Fathers still managed to come up with something as breathtakingly incomprehensible as the electoral college.

Of course, we can’t go back. CNN is here and I’m unaccountably in love with Greta van Susteren, the legal analyst who can speak volumes on anything, and all from the side of her mouth. You go, Greta!

So we definitely need electricity, just as we need those who have visions of conjuring it from the cosmos.

John Woods sent me a note the other day, letting me know that he has harnessed energy from cosmic radiation.

Woods, a 71-year-old Santa Paula contractor who builds electric cars in his spare time, has pored over the patents of Nikola Tesla, the brilliant, eccentric 19th-century inventor responsible for, among other things, alternating current.

For my benefit, he made Tesla’s method for energy generation sound like something any guy with a wrench and a hammer could hook up in about 10 minutes.

“You need a piece of aluminum, maybe the size of a stop sign,” he said. “You can put it up on your garage, but the higher you can get it, the better.”

I won’t list all the ingredients of Tesla’s electric pie here, but you can find them in any hardware store. A few years ago, Woods and some buddies put one of these systems together in the desert somewhere--and, he says, it worked.

“Lo and behold, one day we were getting a current off the thing,” he said. “It was blowing a DC voltmeter all over the place. We hooked up an old car battery someone found and it charged right up.”

A physicist friend of his told him it was impossible.

But that’s the nay-saying of conventional science for you. Personally, I have no doubt that one of these days, I might just hop off my ice pack, tear away my electrodes, climb my garage, and kick my stop sign until Greta van Susteren comes in loud and clear.

I don’t doubt that possibility one bit. I just don’t know if my back can take it.

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Steve Chawkins can be reached at 653-7561 or at steve.chawkins@latimes.com