zeroing out the future

It finally happened. I have an electricity bill of zero pesos due.

Of course, any of us who have CFE (the government-owned Mexican electric company) can replicate my rather simple parlor trick. All we have to do locally is to drive over to the county seat of Cihuatlán and plunk a wad of pesos on the clerk's desk.

Our bills will then register zero pesos -- until the pre-payment runs out. This is where I need to indulge in a bit of self-disclosure. I could be accused of merely doing that. But there is more to this little tale than that.

And here is the rest of the story.

For the past year, I have been living off of free power from the sun -- with a little help from the thousands of dollars-worth of equipment tripoded on my roof. My electro-collaborator, Rick Noble, calculated how many panels I would need to meet my peak power needs. And that is how many panels we installed. As a result, my solar array generates far more electricity on average than I need for any particular day.

But, as Milton Friedman correctly reminded us, there is no such thing as a free lunch. In addition to my capital outlay that would have paid for a two-week stay in a suite at Brown's in London (with several West End tickets thrown in for good measure), CFE still charges me a fee to be connected to its system. Let's just call it a "connection fee." It sounds like what you would pay to the neighborhood thugs to be certain your business did not have something bad happen to it -- like a fire or an accidental bomb.

Because I have two electric meters, CFE sends me two bills every two months for the power I do not consume. One for 42 pesos, the other for 41 pesos. (I have no idea why there is a 1-peso difference.)

That bimonthly payment causes a bit of bother when I travel. For some reason, my northern bank will not permit me to make a credit card payment for the bills without going through the nonsense of calling the bank, getting a code, and hoping I can enter it before it expires in 15 minutes. That process does not work very well when I am in the wilds of Kyrgyzstan.

There are two obvious solutions. The first is to get a Mexican credit card. I tried that through Banamex, but the manager told me I was a loan-risk because of my age. I suppose he presumed I was going to corner the market on Depends, and then immediately keel over with no assets in my savings.

I have not followed up with Intercam. But I should.

Instead, I rely on the simple expedient of paying in advance. CFE is my only bill that I cannot prepay at the bank. That is not entirely accurate. I can prepay for the amount on the last bill. That is usually sufficient.

And I did that when I went north to Oregon last November. I paid the bank clerk 83 pesos -- thinking I had paid the next bill in full. The January bill was waiting for me at the house when I returned. Instead, of zero pesos due, I owed 12 (less than zero).

I had forgotten to give the clerk the service fee for paying my CFE bills at the bank. Had I not returned when I did, Omar would have been without electricity. All for the want of about 60 cents US.

In the belief that I was heading off to India earlier this month, I drove the 15-minutes to the CFE office in our county seat, Cihuatlán, to deposit enough pesos in both accounts to keep the home lights burning for a year or so.

I need those lights burning. During my semi-self-isolation-and-loathing, I have declared Facebook a no-go zone. I became so obsessed with Coronavirus blathering yesterday that I did not read one column-inch of The Economist.

It was a bad trade. Instead of being informed of the doings of the world outside the context of a virus, I spent all of my time digging into the deepest parts of people's darkest psyches. It was like being a cockroach on a psychoanalyst's wall. And far less interesting than it sounds.

To mitigate my own weakness, I put together an Alfred Hitchcock Film Festival in my library. I have had two nights of interesting movies -- starting with Hitchcock. The conceit is similar to one of my favorite movies: Shakespeare in Love. It is a mini-biography of Hitchcock (Anthony Hopkins) and his wife Alma (Helen Mirren) centered around the making of Psycho. With a superb supporting role by Scarlet Johansson as Janet Leigh.

I followed that up with what some critics believe is Hitchcock's best film, North by Northwest. A lot of the movie strikes me as a bit corny, but it is so well-made technically that the corn disappears under the soufflé.

Last night, it was Rear Window and Vertigo, two Jimmy Stewart roles that have him hanging on the edge of life -- literally. I suspect both are good choices for this coronavirus era.

You may recall there was a controversy about including a portion of Bernard Herrmann's Vertigo score in The Artist. The music was used because Herrmann's score is recognized as one of the best ever written for a film.

I have been listening to it all morning. Here is a sample for you, as well.

As long as the electricity holds out, there will be films to be watched and music to be listened to. If my payment calculations were not correct, I can always pull out a jigsaw puzzle.

I do not need to pay anyone for that pleasure.