A Hipocracy That Involves Current Weather Patterns :: December 4th, 2001 ::
So, I’ve never cared for turning current weather conditions into a conversation piece. Doing so is uncreative and worse, idle; we have no control over the weather (unless I’ve missed something, of course), and usually when two people begin talking about it, the conversation quickly degenerates into a general discussion of how little control we all have over so many aspects of our lives. I do believe, quite strongly (now that I’ve put it into words), that were we to look at all of human existence with the same mind set that we look at the meteorological conditions to which we are subjected, we are in fact a very powerless, very weak species, who has no control over the direction that our lives take. In this sense, I think of this weather talk as something of a gateway conversation, much in the same way that Marijuana is thought of as a gateway drug: in itself harmless, but it leads to a lifestyle that some would consider “detrimental” or “unhealthy.”
But with that said, I now want to talk about the weather.
See, last year, it started snowing in the Midwest sometime in the middle of December, and it didn’t stop until sometime in January. The statistics we were left with showed that we had just dealt with the coldest December in 106 years. Were you here for this? It was terrible. But I think the people loved it here, mostly for sadistic, self-loathing reasons. Individual reactions of people ranged quite a bit. People of a pro-industrial, slash-and-burn mentality took the month’s weather as further proof that environmentalism was an unsupportable, empty effort cooked up by a bunch of maniacal, granola-crunching Marxists who hated private enterprise and were looking to hinder all progress. Young Midwestern sentimentalists, who felt that he steady increase of the Earth’s temperature over the past had cheated of them of an authentic winter, felt like their dreams had been realized. And of course, for everyone, the freezing weather, the frozen cars, the sub zero temperatures that were intolerable during the day and breathed death at night was just the perfect target for complaint. My view, however, was that it all just felt normal. Not quite a sentimentalist, I just felt for that month that maybe, just maybe, an environmental disaster was a bit further off than I’d thought before.
See, even if I weren’t to think about what the deeper scientific meaning of inclimate December weather could mean, high temperatures at this time of year still leaves me feeling very strange. Seeing people out, walking to the bank in t-shirts, smiling and wearing sunglasses, when it’s the middle of December, makes me feel like something is just not working right. Like the next thing I should expect to see is the sun shining at midnight and the neighborhood rodents asking themselves over for dinner and cocktails. I mean come on, shouldn’t we be trained by now to dress in layers, to be donning our down coats, to stretch our flannel sheets over our mattresses and pull out the extra, moldy-smelling blankets? Shouldn’t we be expecting at least slightly higher gas bills than the ones that we got in August? And when that doesn’t happen, shouldn’t we have an eerie sense of foreboding, like how you feel in that dream just before you look down and find yourself completely naked, sitting in a classroom somewhere? Call me a slave to routine, but anything outside of this very specific, very difficult lifestyle that should be winters around here just doesn’t feel right. It feels like a car with all metal wheels or something.
Not that the extraordinary or the unexpected is bad, by any means. I mean, I like the possibility of having a raccoon, a sewer rat, and a squirrel seated at my kitchen table, smoking pipes, drinking scotch, and discussing something appropriately Postmodern, like the works of Lyotard. I also like the idea of the sun never setting, and of living in a dimension completely free of gravity. But that doesn’t mean I want any of these things to be a part of a reality so vivid, so tangible that I have no control over it. Know what I mean? This weather is the same way. Though the dislocation from the expected is interesting, it leaves me feeling strange, lost, like the rules of the world are ones I can neither control nor predict, that I have no understanding, and that I stand little hope of getting any better. So, on top of everything else, there is despair.
Yes, I am aware of the slight hypocrisy here.
