Living in a Snow Globe

I am going to affirm it right here right now. I am going to start my day off positively. Writing this paper is going to be a blast and I am going to do a good job. Now all I have to do is let time wash over me and the paper will write itself. I will procrastinate by writing on my blog.

It is raining outside. Last night I had a desire that I never thought I would have. I was sitting in my kitchen, wearing a wool coat and hat, while shivering. And then suddenly I had this longing for the sound of rain on the roof. Big, warm, tropical raindrops. I want to shed the layers of clothing and go back to the days of bare feet and t-shirts. I am happy to say that this morning, the snow is gone. But instead of satisfaction, I feel claustrophobic. Get me out of this northwest winter! I want to see the sun again.

The other night it was snowing for the third time in two weeks and the new snow was covering the brown snow. All the nieghbors were outside smoking excessively and drinking hot spiced apple cider. The great thing about falling snow is the acustics. Everything is so silent--so fizzy.

Doug and I were in middle of the street taking core samples from the inch of soldid ice accumulated on the road after the snow turned to freezing rain, when Monica appeared in her Honda, telling us to get in. She was working. She delivers Chinese food. So Doug and I got in the car and off we went. Monica had Pink Floyd blasting on the radio, the second track from the Darkside of the Moon, it fit the schizophrenic situation we were in perfectly. This was the situation: Monica risking her life, and now ours, to deliver dorm kids Chinese food in the middle of an ice storm, for minimum wage. It goes many levels beyond that but I will keep this story out of the realm of theory. I have a deep sense of awe for delivery drivers. They are professional drivers. The amateur drivers are all of us who are not professionals; the people swaying back and forth while singing Jewel's greatest hits, as if that metal box rolling down the highway at 70 miles an hour is as benign as the comfy couch in the living room.

We get up to the dorms. I have never been to a dorm. They are very strange. I realized what the dorms are and this realization made me shudder. Remember in High School the cool people had those binders with the clear plastic cover so that they could showcase how popular they were with pictures of their friends under the plastic. Well living in the dorm is a lot like living under that sheet of plastic on the front a notebook. All the kids had their windows decorated with pictures and political slogans. It was a bumper sticker convention. I hate bumper stickers.
Monica delivered the Chinese food to three hungry girls who invited us in, even Doug and me. They were watching a make over show. There were three of them in a living space the size of my computer table. What a cruel experiment these kids unwittingly participating in.

After the noodle drop, Monica dropped us off back home, in the now lethally icy street. As Doug and I were walking up to the neighbors house, we both noticed that Brent, an acquaintance with a heroin problem, was guiltily walking out of my house. We went to investigate. Brent was hiding behind a bush exhibiting the tendencies of man that stretch all the way back to Adam and Eve--guilt and shame. In his hands Brent was holding my painted Styrofoam mannequin art piece, and a couch pillow fresh off my couch. Calmly, "Brent what are you doing with my stuff?". He put the the mannequin head in the snow and the pillow on top of it. "I needed to take a piss Matt, and I couldn't make it to your bathroom so uh I was going to piss on the pillow." Poor Brent there is only one brain cell left in his head and it is being squeezed from all sides by junk. I took the pillow and mannequin and put it back. At work, cleaning hotel rooms I can always tell those people that are on hard drugs, their rooms are always rearranged in the most irrational ways. I recognized Brent's bathroom strategy as a hyper symptom of the same phenomena.

Later....As the traffic slowed to a crawl in front of our houses, Doug and Mike threw snow balls at the passing cars. All fun and games. A couple times the occupants vacated their vehicles in the middle of the road and returned fire, laughing and making merry. The rest of us laughed and pointed from the porch. But this story doesn't end as a Thomas Kincaid painting, no, it ends in a case of road rage and a theory about penis size.

A gigantic Ford, F-80 trillion, truck drove by which promted ALL of us to unleash a fury of snow balls at it, mainly because the truck was so huge and unnecessary. We didn't get the same jolly reaction that the others had given us, the driver of the metal beast, a young guy, pulled over and got out of his truck and threw his hands up in the air. "Which one of you mother fuckers threw that snow ball?" Was this guy really this angry, really this lame? We all looked at each other with surprise and the beginning of smiles at the corners of our lips. Mike told him that we had all thrown snow balls. The guy looked closer through the snow and darkness and saw five above average size men standing in their own yard, so he backed down but went strait to his truck and grabbed his cell phone. I am not usually a hateful guy. But in that moment I felt a hatred for that kind of guy. Hate is a strong word, maybe pity is a better word, a completely different word. the guy left but came back a moment later and hucked two cans of coke at us, yelling obscenities and insisting that he had fucked our mothers. How embarrassing.

Diana says that the bigger the truck the smaller the penis. I disagree, but after watching this guy throw cans of coke, or corprate bullets, at a crowd of happy civilians, I think she may be on to something.

So yes, I think we are all ready for summer to come.