Trick or Treat, Trick Knees, Tricks of the Trade and Tricky Driving

Halloween! I love this holiday. I never do it right, plan ahead or anything, but I love seeing the kids and some of the grown-up kids pull off miracles of costumes. Halloween is sadly the last of the yearly holidays that I care about. We now go into the winter holidays with all the forced togetherness and nog based drinks that go with them. Bummer.

I did just watch the extended forecast for the winter here in West Michigan... 16 more inches snow this year than last. More than normal. More general precipitation other than snow, too. That means ice, freezing rain, sleet and other shit.

I. Hate. Winter. I don't mind the cold. I hate the snow. I don't like being constrained in any way and snow is extremely constraining. Everything is slowed down to a crawl or unnecessarily challenging and dangerous. It takes so much time to just dress properly and get the car warm enough so it doesn't shatter into a million pieces when you cross the first railroad tracks. On the road, where I really live, people that in summer are the subject of my hair trigger middle finger become more than mere inconveniences and minor annoyances, they become deadly. To me. If you want to be self-deadly, that's fine, keep it off the roads. If death is your bag, I suggest drunken skiing (ask a Kennedy), drunken hunting, (give Bambi a chance), and ice fishing with dynamite.

I knew before I saw the forecast show what it was going to be. I have a sixth sense about weather. My wife will tell you if I say it, it is likely at least in the ballpark. I just use my various biological barometers to tune in to mother nature (who in winter is a different kind of mother). A combination of a throbbing left knee and burning hips means pressure is dropping and snow is imminent. If I have a temporal headache and my right pinky throbs at the first knuckle, we are about to have extreme cold. And so on.

Were it up to me, if it could happen financially, I would flee. I don't know where I would go. I've spent winters in New Jersey and Georgia and while there is little to no snow, it rains and is do damp that you may as well be living in a bucket of water. Em resolutely refuses to go to the desert and I don't think it would matter too much. We visited my parents one February and it was colder in Las Vegas than it was in Michigan. The Caribbean life is not alluring to me, but the Mediterranean sure is. I don't even have enough money to pay the deposit on that dream.

At the very least I would like to have a job where I didn't have to leave the house. In Mid November, I would fill a gigantic deep freezer with all I need, load up the dry pantry with enough canned goods to support a community food bank, Go by a rick of firewood, hang the Christmas lights, and close the curtains and hunker down until April.

If people would pay me to write, I could convert a room in my house to a proper office and just laugh as I look out the window at the chumps who have real jobs. They would ask, "Are you going to shovel your driveway?" I would simply answer, "Nah. Why bother? Freezer's full of food, and it's cold. I'm sitting this out... until Memorial Day."

I guess I wouldn't mind if I had a cabin in the woods where I could get all bundled up and play in the snow. I can't and won't ski, but I love a good snow-mobile ride. But the cabin would only be one more thing that needed another piece of me and there just aren't any pieces left to pass around.

For those of you dear reader (left singular on purpose) who love the seasons, God bless you. I will be releasing my inner Grinch and humbugging my way through the next 5 months. I'll see you when the grass pokes back out through the ebbing snow.