Snow Drifts, pt. 1

Shaking this early morning aversion that I've developed at the role call of the alarm clock. My body wasn't made for such marvelous things. Or maybe it is too marvelous for such dreadful things as the shrieking of the radio at 5:30 in the morning.

Slightly less than an hour after dragging my knuckles through the house (I slept on the couch last night, in a failed attempt to catch some Letterman before the Sandman's visit), I catch snow. As in, on my shoes with the sludging texture of early and late season precipitation in Chicago.

The sight catches my breath like asphysxiation. Everything that is not concrete is white, at least as far as the view from the top is concerned. I feel nostalgic for family visits to the suburbs, for shopping downtown, for highly expandable - and short-living - radio-controlled cars on a track that leads to nowhere but where it began, for twenty-five different rocking versions of "It's Christmas Time," for trips to the suburbs to see family that we only get to be around once a year, for the highly anticipated gifts so perfectly wrapped by our parents that we are given the illusion - however temporarily - that we have not received another pack of underwear, for that extremely rare occasion when we would receive cool draws (e.g., Underoos), for the feeling that somebody cares deeply for me and that I don't need to worry about not a thing - for I'm covered much as the snow covers the ground.

Although I don't doubt that the love is there as much now as it was then (and immeasurable and in various degrees by many people), self-dependence is hard work and will kill a man as surely and grossly as a immense cold.