There was a time when I would do war with winter (NB: There is supposed to be a plug here for a previous post where I explained how me and my trusted shovel, Freudigeschaufel, broke Old Man Winter’s back… but I can’t find that post, maybe because Medium’s search and indexing services suck or maybe because it was a “response” to an article by a Medium “ghost”) but I am not doing war this winter. The snow keeps piling up. I barely clear the area between the back door and my car. There is ice everywhere. My deck is a disaster. It still has a summer chair on it. On that chair is a cooler I used at Thanksgiving and the Christmas tree stand. All three have gone through the snow-thaw-ice cycle so many times that the pile is now shrouded in every possible permutation of frozen precipitation. It is a work of art. An installation I call “procrastination.” It is a small monument of no fucks… a cairn of uncaring, the outward expression of my spiritual and intellectual entropy.
Another reason I’m not doing battle with winter is because my back hurts. My back hurts because I spend all day at the iron pig. I spend all day at the iron pig because half of my students are in the ether. The students are in the ether instead of in front of me because of the pandemic.
The pandemic… the pandemic. I have many complaints, yet here, deep in the hole, where we are surrounded by water, we can still see…
