The snow is outside. \u00c2\u00a0Waiting. \u00c2\u00a0I can see it, still, resting, on the flip side of my window. \u00c2\u00a0“Snow, snow, go away,” I chant, but I know it’s laughing at me, amused by my efforts and entirely unaffected by the rhymes that held so much more power when I was young enough to listen intently, one night each year, for a careless sleigh bell up high. \u00c2\u00a0Snow was magic then.<\/p>\n
Now it’s just malevolent. \u00c2\u00a0Hand-in-hand with its pal the bitter cold, they’re pressing their ice cube noses up against my second floor window and daring me to come outside; a tag team of winter vampires hoping to dine on chilled… wine. \u00c2\u00a0It promises beauty, this blanket of white, and each polka-dotted burst from the heavens carries the seductive memory of the anticipation of school being canceled. \u00c2\u00a0They’re my memories, true, but they no longer apply: these days when the blizzard hits I no longer can count on the comfort of a couch, cartoons, and a bowl full of puffed sugar Ohs; instead, I work for The Man, and he tells me I have to trudge on in to work, anyway, no matter the revival of He-Man scheduled for that morning’s line-up.<\/p>\n
The Man has no soul. \u00c2\u00a0But he pays well, so there’s that.<\/p>\n
The snow is relentless. \u00c2\u00a0It follows me to work and tries to swallow me, to my knees, when I misstep on the journey from my car to the front door. “Haw-haw,” it says, as I wiggle free. \u00c2\u00a0“I’m just joshin’ ya. \u00c2\u00a0But I sure got ya, didn’t I?” \u00c2\u00a0One of these days I know it won’t let go, and that we’ll finally get to the punchline I’m pretty sure I won’t find all that hilarious.<\/p>\n
So, it’s there, still, outside, peeking into my office window from the adjacent roof–a Jack Frost who’s really a Peeping Tom. \u00c2\u00a0It’s tempting to want to grab an extension cord and my wife’s hair dryer and go teach the bastard a lesson. \u00c2\u00a0When tomorrow morning finally stumbles in and the squawk box tells tales of a man-shaped icicle\u00c2\u00a0 found dangling from his roof with a sputtering Conair in his hand, know that I went down fighting. \u00c2\u00a0And that I ruined my wife’s hair dryer.<\/p>\n
But that I went down fighting is a much more manly memory. \u00c2\u00a0So, maybe you can tell people I had a flamethrower?<\/p>\n
Yeah. \u00c2\u00a0Snownan the Barbarian, that’s me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The snow is outside. \u00c2\u00a0Waiting. \u00c2\u00a0I can see it, still, resting, on the flip side of my window. \u00c2\u00a0“Snow, snow, go away,” I chant, but I know it’s laughing at me, amused by my efforts and entirely unaffected by the rhymes that held so much more power when I was young enough to listen intently, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-359","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-live-a-little"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skipfitz.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skipfitz.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skipfitz.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skipfitz.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skipfitz.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=359"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.skipfitz.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":360,"href":"https:\/\/www.skipfitz.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359\/revisions\/360"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skipfitz.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skipfitz.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skipfitz.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}