Waiting on line for free dry ice, courtesy of Con Ed.

WESTCHESTER COUNTY, New York – For all the anticipation, Hurricane Irene was a nonevent weatherwise here, some 40 miles north of my Wired office in Times Square. But it did usher in the longest power outage I’ve experienced in quite some time. I not only do not have power, but I do not have internet: Neither of my iPhones (AT&T and Verizon) have voice or data signal to speak of. I am reduced to — sometimes — texts.

And I am quite, quite in love with this state of affairs.

In his recent book Always On, my friend and former colleague Brian Chen posits a simple thesis about modern life: We live in an always-on world. This generation will never know what its like to be disconnected from the internet, or even understand a world without the net. The consequences, ramifications and benefits of being always on are vast and at this juncture in history still largely unknowable.

I am an always-on person at the DNA level. Though my formative years were in the Age of TV, not the internet era, I became an early-on always-on advocate and practitioner. I was filing news reports from my car with a Radio Shack TRS-200 when most people didn’t even own a mobile phone. I owned one of the first (of two) Bluetooth-enabled mobile phones, and was connecting disconnected Palms eons before the Treo. And so on.

I can no more imagine a world that is not one huge data-and-communications grid than I could imagine how anybody could not live in New York City.

Which brings me to today. I am surprised to find myself enveloped in a bliss which is as acute as it is intense.

This very post, being written on an unconnected laptop. That's it, behind the massive martini.

Adding to the somnambulist aura are the facts that my teenage daughter is asleep, and my wife is away visiting her mother. My neighborhood is cemetery-silent most of the time anyway. I am truly without distraction, living in an empty house. I have indoor plumbing and running water, but no electricity and all that enables — and imposes.

My daughter, a true denizen of the Always On Cafe, can’t function. She has been sleeping all day, and told me this was a conscious decision — “I don’t know what do to with myself.” A friend of hers stops in to try and get parental buy-in for a road trip to find internet.

I think of “The Search for Wi-Fi,” which sounds to me like a very low-rent Tom Clancy novel. “My father said he’d drive us,” friend tells Audrey. “I heard there was Wi-Fi in Chappaqua.”

I remind them about those emphatic texts from the police urging us to stay at home — what with all those pesky, downed live power lines and trees blocking roads everywhere. Instead, daughter and friend drive 50 feet to the corner, where there is a whiff of 3G.

We dropped in on similarly situated neighbors a bit later. They were also enjoying the peace, their table a bounty of snacks that on another day would have shouted, “Super Bowl.”

They were upbeat, but not as bucolic as I. “Sure,” the mom said. “The first day it’s all Little House on the Prairie. In three days it will be Lord of the Flies.”

I went home, strategically distributed candles, returned to grilling for the sake of it, opened a not-quite-yet lukewarm beer, and sat on the deck contemplating the swaying tree tops.

It’s not just a matter of having an excuse not to look at e-mail, or check the weather updates, or watch cable news to hear the same thing over and over again. It’s not even that I am finding the peace and quiet intoxicating, or that I suddenly have time for domestic chores that, to validate B.F. Skinner, are so important to connect one’s soul to one’s being.

The utter lack of noise, or distraction, is an amazing thing, and something which cannot be artificially replicated very well. The dynamic might help explain why e-readers work: difficult to impossible to switch to the web, or take a call. Isolation tanks used to be a fad — stream Altered States for a fun ride and one of the best lines in movie history. But that was about sensory deprivation when our five senses were being assaulted only in the physical world.

These days, intrusion cuts much deeper. The virtual world which connects us all, and gives everyone a voice, isn’t exactly a cacophony, but it is a crowded place that many find difficult to tear away from, like that great cocktail party or that walk on the beach with that certain someone that you hoped against hope actually would never end. There is nothing like a power outage — zip zip! no electricity! — to blunt-force it for you.

Okay, I will welcome power when it comes back, not only for the obvious hygiene benefits but because, honestly, I am not Amish and do not aspire to be. The loss of power is a fun diversion, and has provided the perfect scientific conditions for digital isolation, but I am not a fanatic and am not pretending to be one.

And, OK, I am not writing this on a Remington manual typewriter, but with a laptop operating on battery power.

When this post will get published, however, I do not know.

And guess what? Just like I haven’t missed updating Twitter, or Instagram, or Google+, I don’t really care.

Written Sunday, Aug. 28.