Frozen Fish
"It's. . .
Colder than the nipple on the witch's tit!
Colder than a bucket of penguin shit!
Colder than the hairs of a polar bear's ass!
Colder than the frost on a champagne glass!"
-- Thomas Pynchon,Gravity's Rainbow
Warning in advance-- I am likely to be in a shitty mood for the next little while. Luckily, I will be joined in this by many of my fellow Minnesotans. While everyone over the age of six is familiar with that let down feeling at the end of the holidays, here in the Precious Land of the Ever So Special January 2nd hits like an anvil pitched off a cliff and bounces around alarmingly until at least late March. It's not the end of the world, but you can definitely see it from here-- the snows of our coveted white Christmas compacted into glacial bits of road filth and frozen slush, no sanctioned celebrations on tap until Valentine's Day (Martin Luther King Day being, for most people, one of those weird Monday holidays that has as much to do with Dr. King and civil rights as Labor Day has to do with the working class), which tends to piss off as many people as it pleases, and the cozy feeling of being indoors away from the arctic air masses starting to show the first signs of congealing into terminal cabin fever.
Looking on the bright side under such conditions is both difficult and tedious, especially in a state culture that celebrates Lent without Mardi Gras, but strive we must. There are good things about a Minneapolis winter-- hockey, a number of good curry houses and Szechuan restaurants, Phillips Sno Shoe Grog, an excuse to share body heat if such an excuse is needed. The trick is to get to those good things without spending too much time outdoors. Should we live so long (four months? five?), we will eventually emerge into that day when the last of the ice melts and the lilacs start to bloom. In the meantime, you'll forgive us if we seem a little testy-- we're not unfeeling, just a bit numb at the extremities.
