January 25, 2007 - Thursday

January 25, 2007 - Thursday
some normal thoughts on being warm
Now listen. It's -27º today here in the nation's crapital.

(That's -16º Degrees Fahrenheit for the English, and 63 Beats Per Minute in Ireland)

Does anyone truly understand how retarded that is?

This from the news today:

"When the temperatures drop people, property, and animals can be at risk... It can freeze and break pipes, and even indirectly cause fires when home heating methods turn dangerous…"
Those home heating 'methods' can only be people desperately attempting to get warm by lighting their friends and family on fire –and failing that, lighting themselves.

Here are some things that occur at -27º:

Water freezes
Ice expands enough to shatter rocks
Hypothermia sets in
Frostbite begins to occur
Food can be dry-frozen
Breathing hurts
The slightest sustained injury has eight times the pain value.
Complete strangers compulsively say, "Cold enough for ya, eh?"

And people –even Priests and old women– respond with, "Yeah, motherfucking cold."
The dogs are wearing stupid boots and the cats are staring at you with an accusatory look that says, "What the fuck, man?" You see men standing splay-footed with their pants down outside of bars, solidly and embarrassingly attached to their frozen piss-streams, their testicles audibly knocking together like steel ball-bearings. People's faces are locked in the 'Right Now I'm Attempting to Crap an Obelisk of Ice' position; teeth clenched, eyes bulging, faces strained and red.

Every man woman and child in Ottawa is wearing a burka made from their futon beds; their arms extended at right angles from their bodies, their knees not bending because of all the layers they're wearing. One could say that it would be a good time for muggings because of their stiffened helplessness: you can keel someone over with the tip of your finger. The problem is the long and desperate minutes that pass during the futile archaeological dig through all the layers to find a person's valuables. And which layer would it be located in anyway? Fuck it, too cold, pick a number between 1 and 17 and make the grab. Whatever you find will have to do. By the same token, people dressed for this climate are immune to bullets and any kind of stabbing weapon short of a whale harpoon

Everybody outdoors has the frozen grin of the truly deranged –those of them whose faces you can actually see. It's a grimace that strains the boundaries of the 'niceness' that people perceive Canadians as having. Of course we're nice wherever we go; we're just excited that our snot hasn't frozen into two long shocking icicles, and our eyelids haven't been glued shut by our own tears.

This sort of thing has the makings for the funniest foot-chase in action-movie history.
You shovel the driveway, not realizing that the seemingly soft-looking snow has become the same hardened consistency of a diamond. Your first awkward lunge with the shovel and you have impaled yourself with the handle. You spend the next moments wheezing frozen air into your tortured empty lungs.

And when you finally get inside a warm place and go through the half-hour procedure of undressing, your extremities are bitten with the most agonizing pain known to man. This pain is a little like having the jaws of a starved badger locked onto every single one of your fingers and toes… as well as your nose. People around you unexpectedly and stutteringly find religion:

"J-j-jesus G-god!"
"S-s-sweet B-b-b-b-baby Jesus and his m-m-m-mother Mary!"
"L-l-l-lord God, H-h-h-holy F-f-father!"
"Ya Al-la-la-la-ah!"

…or they're suddenly members of the Temple of Tourrettes:

"Wow, it's really quite chilly –SODOMIZE MY EARHOLE!– outside."
"Yes, the weather –JACK-OFF! CUMSTAIN!– is really quite unreasonable."

I read a story about some guys that were found in the cold outdoors suffering from extreme hypothermia. After their rescuers deemed them to be suitably warm they give them all a cup of tea and sent them to bed. They were all found dead the next day. Seems the tea was too much of a shock for their cold bodies. Many of my English friends are no doubt aghast and horrified at the thought of deadly tea. I'm sure that they will agree with me on this: Any kind of environment that turns a warm cup of harmless tea into fatal molten lava in your chilled system should be outlawed, shot, and pissed on.

I'm half West-Indian and that half is seriously, seriously unsure of my sanity in being here. When I tried to go for a walk this morning it was deliberately trying to trip me up so I couldn't get out the door –anything from causing me to want to urinate after putting on all eight of the requisite layers, to babbling distracting gibberish loudly enough that my step-mother asked me, is something wrong?

Even my Dutch half is unimpressed; saying things like, "You see? This is why you should be in Europe. It never gets this cold in Europe" and, "Het bevriest u idiot. Ga niet daar uit" (Translation: "Well, this sucks").

And there is one other thing that they both agree on: At least there is sunlight.

Which begs the question: Is it better to be depressed in comparative warmth than to clearly see your flatulence behind you?