3:49 p.m. - 2007-01-17
If This is an Ice Storm, Where's Sigourney Weaver
Fuck winter.
Texas and winter have basically had a deal for the past few decades; well, let's say Central Texas and winter. The deal has been that when winter shows up, it will do so for no more than a few days at a time, usually accompanied by dry weather. Once every few years, it may leave a dusting of snow, to the delight of children of all ages. Work goes on. School is rarely cancelled. Life proceeds as normal, with a crispness in the air that does little more than make a mug of hot chocolate all the more appealing.
Winter, bitch that she is, has gone back on the deal. She has not simply shown up, but she's shown up with a suitcase, taken over the couch, and is clearing out the fridge even as I write this. Fuck winter right in the ear. Sure, when she first arrived, there were the gentle, glittering flurries that had us all humming "Oh the weather outside is frightful, but the fire is so delightful, and since there's no place to go, let it snow! Let it snow! Let it snow!" Well, I have places I need to go. I need to leave the house. I need to go to coffeeshops and study, and I need to go buy groceries, and I need to do a lot of other things that I can't do because winter's fat ass is in my way.
I can't go anywhere, though, because this is Texas, where people can't even drive in the rain, let alone on ice. Case in point, six days ago, when a torrential downpour turned Dean Keeton St. into a lake. I know this because I drive on Dean Keeton in order to leave my house, but when I got to it I noticed that cars were stopping. And driving up on the sidewalk to turn around. Then I saw the car in the middle of Lake Dean Keeton, with its hazard lights blinking, as though people might not notice a half-submerged car in the middle of the road.
Of course, to be charitable, this is far more evidence that the city's infrastructure is not prepared for any weather emergency other than it's-so-hot-I-can-boil-a-chicken-in-my-birdbath-and-incidentally-would-you-like-some-mockingbird-soup (state bird of Texas, y'all). However, some schmuck decided to brave Dean Keeton, perhaps in the belief that the waters would part for someone with a Jesus fish on their car.
They didn't have a Jesus fish, that I remember. I was being mean. I'm sorry. It's the weather, I swear.
In San Antonio, mind you, where I grew up, people not only braved placid lakes where roads once were, they braved raging rivers where roads once were. And by braved, I mean moroned. Seriously, every year at least one person died because of this in my home town, despite the fact that a lot of the at-risk areas had flood gauges on the side of the road to let people know how high the water was. Perhaps they thought it was a rating rather than a unit of measure. "This flood's only a five and a half? I can handle a five and a half flood. If this were a seven flood, I'd worry, but a five and a half? This Miata can TOTALLY handle a five and a half."
If only the floods claimed all the idiot drivers in Texas. Instead, even when the roads are slick with rain and the forecast has said it is only a matter of time before that rain freezes, people still have no problem running red lights, cutting across four lanes with no blinker, cutting people off, and slamming on the brakes because they want to see if they can spot any human remains in the accident scene across the highway. I know this because at least three of these things happened on my way from the grocery store to my father's house on Monday, the last day before we were told the serious ice and snow would hit.
Now, of course, the ice and snow has hit, and I'm not leaving the house. Ron White, who is one of my favorite comics and by far the best part of the Blue Collar Comedy Tour movies (I think he suffers because of this because he doesn't tow a conservative, anti-intellectual party line, and therefore comes across as the least "just like us" of the "blue collar" comedians, all of whom have made enough money to make certain neither they nor their children will ever be anything but white collar laundered by a housekeeper, while at the same time being associated with the tour and therefore dismissed as a yahoo by a lot of other potential fans) said something very apropos regarding a man who wanted to wait outside for a tornado to prove his masculinity. Ron White said, "It's not THAT the wind is blowing. It's WHAT the wind is blowing." Likewise, having lived in the northeast and driven around in wintery weather, I feel like I could handle my day as usual, which at the moment consists of finding places to do my orals reading where I won't be distracted by roommates and/or television. However, I know that out there I may, in fact, run into other people who have never driven on ice, or, to put it more accurately, that they might run into me and kill me. Ice doesn't bother me. An eighteen wheeler doing it's best Michelle Kwan impression in my general direction does.
Truth be told, I might be dumb enough to leave the house if it weren't for the fact that most of Austin is closed. A number of local businesses, knowing that it would be bad for a business if customers, unable to brake, crashed their vehicles into the side of the building, have closed for the duration of the freeze. I found this out when going to go study at a coffee shop only to find it in the process of closing. So then I figured it was time to run by the grocery store, score some food for the next few days, and head over to my Dad's house, where I would be able to exercise indoors and which would, truth be told, be warmer than the house I'm living in. So it was from the comfort of my Dad's couch, with the cable TV promising me near endless entertainment, that I watched the ice and snow come down, taking pictures that I sent to my Texan friends living in Seattle and New York, letting them know that Austin had become, for the first time in years, a true winter wonderland.
Now I am contemplating hooking up some sort of powerful blowtorch to the hood of my car so that I can get out of here for one goddamn hour and get some hot food that I don't have to cook. Not that I don't love tofu egg salad, but oh wait, I've eaten it all already. And the cabin fever combined with the cable TV has made it impossible for me to even look at a page of Henry James, who is hard to read in the best of times, for more than a minute at a time. I haven't seen anyone outside my immediate family in days. I'm isolated, bored, antsy, and hungry for food that I can't really get to because who knows if the places I usually eat will be open. All I can do is look outside at the icicles, the trees looking, appropriately enough, exactly like they did in the movie The Ice Storm, which took place in NEW ENGLAND, where winter is SUPPOSED TO STAY!
No tornado hit my house, of course. We still have power, and we never, in fact, lost it. That I have a roof over my head at all in weather like this makes me lucky. I am grateful, of course, that the biggest thing I have to put up with at this point is ennui and the occassional bitter taste of knowing that all this would be much more delightful if I were at the home of an attractive young gentleman rather than at the home of my father. It should be warm enough to drive around tomorrow, which means that a number of businesses are going to realize that their losses are about to get too big to cut. On the other hand, there will still be rain through th rest of the week, and even more "wintry mix" next week.
Is it just me or shouldn't "wintry mix" be either some combination of yogurt pretzels, chex, and peppermint or some techno-house version of The Nutcracker?
For most of my life, I've loved winter. I definitely missed it while I was in California. I always tried to make a trip to the Northeast to feel the cold on my cheeks. The Northeast, however, was both full of people who knew how to drive on ice and snow and fully equipped with mass transit and taxis. So winter, sorry for being so mean earlier. I love you to bits. I love snow, and snowball fights (that's SNOWball, not ICEball, Penn Players . . . you know what I'm talking about . . . ), and putting on and taking off coat-scarf-hat-gloves all the time, and two-story icicles, and most of all the way a hot beverage feels on a cold morning. I just want you where I know I can handle you, where I'm prepared to handle you, and so is everyone else.
In other words, winter, please pack up your shit and get the fuck out. Thank you.
