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Fire And Ice.

It’s warm for February, a meteorological island where I don’t even need to put on a jacket before going out. The weather’s been brutally cold, and we’ve even had an unusual amount of snow, so this sudden spike, while nice for those of us who tend to be more cold-blooded, is also unsettling. February shouldn’t feel like May, though the coming May will probably, at least at times, feel like August, when it really should feel more like September. It’s even possible that May will feel like February, which will be even worse.

There were times like this when I was a kid, brief warm spells in the middle of winter, the bare trees and beige spiky grass contrasting sharply with the ambient warmth. My parents insisted I still go out wearing at least a jacket. It was still winter, after all. That’s what the calendar said and that mattered more than the thermometer. At any moment the heat could break, like a fever, like the time my own temperature spiked and I stayed in bed all day, shivering even as my body burned,a thick quilt pulled up to my forehead, and hours swirled away into a dark funnel. And the heat did break, eventually, cold rushing back into the world the way it did on those late nights when I’d open my window to listen to the darkness.

The sky then was always cloudy when it was warm, another disjunction. The sky looked like winter even if the ground didn’t feel like it. It’s cloudy now, too, the flat dull gray of cold weather, of a sky that doesn’t have the energy to do anything but spread itself out and close its eyes. 

This afternoon, though, there was a change. The clouds curled up, still swaddling the sun but there was an azure expanse overhead. And off in the distance there was the faintest rainbow, barely together, a block of the spectrum against a flat backdrop of ash.

I’m not sure how to feel about this. We have words for how the winter cold makes us feel, and the summer heat, but a warm February has me tongue-tied. How should I feel? I ask the sky as though I need some external guidance, something to tell me what it means. But I know what it means. The world is in flux, in motion, and things will change even as I am, for the moment, frozen.

 

Stick To It.

I’ve seen the “Please Let Me Merge Before I Start Crying” sticker several times now, including one version that had musical notes around it which made me think there was a song with that line in it. However I couldn’t find one. There should be a song. What I did find was that some people are annoyed by the sticker, which I don’t understand. Every time I see it I feel sorry for the driver and think, well, of course I’m going to let you merge. Then I realize the only reason I’m seeing it is because they’re in front of me, probably because I’ve let them merge. That makes me feel a little better. I’ve done a small thing to keep someone from crying. Of course I also avoid driving on interstates as much as I can—I’ll take the slightly slower stop-and-start traffic of regular roads simply because anything over 60MPH makes me nervous. I’ve also done the math, or rather the maps. In most cases the hassle of getting to the on-ramp, going down the interstate, and then getting to the off-ramp wouldn’t save me more than a few minutes. My morning commute would actually be longer if I took the interstate, at least in part because of all the traffic. Most of it would be the trucks getting an early start on their long hauls.

On the subject of bumper stickers I used to work in customer service for a company that provided truckers with fuel and other costs on the road as well as their paychecks. Most of the time the truckers I talked to were nice and grateful for the help but once in a while something would go wrong and a few got really, really angry. One day as my coworkers and I were sitting at our stations answering the phones the higher-ups handed out bumper stickers with the company logo. We all smiled politely and quietly slipped them into the trash. The last thing we all wanted was for some angry truck driver to come up behind us on the interstate and take out all that frustration on our car.

Most of the time while driving, though, I don’t really notice bumper stickers, or, if I do, they’re too small or go by too fast for me to read them and I’m focused on driving. Sometimes while parked and walking somewhere I’ll see a car with a fun collection of bumper stickers that makes me want to stop and wait until the driver comes back just so I can say, “Hey, I really like your style.”

That may be a little bit too forward.

Funny Face.

A lot of street art is just tagging. I cringe whenever I see simple scribbles, usually done with just a plain black magic marker, on a lamppost or wall or dumpster. I think, if you’re going to leave your mark why not make it good? So even though I defend street art as legitimate art as well as the most free expression, a true testament to the idea that anyone can be an artist, I am a little bit of a snob. I try to keep an open mind but I still have standards. And there are examples of creative and, in my opinion, well-done tagging: many street artists put up their signatures in vivid colors using block or balloon lettering. After the simple tags elaborate signatures may be the most common form of street art.

It’s nice, then, to see something very different. It was so surprising and funny that at first I didn’t realize the artist had signed their work, but they did, off to the side. You can find and follow Sqish on Instagram if you’re so inclined. They do some amazing stuff. But I also felt like a signature wasn’t needed. The work itself is distinctive enough that it is their signature. Some artists are like that: their work is so iconoclastic they don’t even need to sign it. I play the game Artle every day–guess the artist from four of their works. Once in a while I get it in one. Even if I don’t recognize the work itself the style gives it away. Sometimes I have to get up to the third or fourth painting because artists’ styles evolve over time and even the ones we think of as the most distinctive and recognizable experimented a lot with different styles, but that’s another story.

Although it’s also the nature of street art that, even with a name, it’s still basically anonymous, the artists themselves unknown and their work left to speak for itself.

What A Card.

Fake gravestone for Penn & Teller at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale, California. They had this installed as a setup for card tricks. Source: The Dead Conjurers

I lost my work ID card. It was a stupid thing to do and it’s even worse that I’d managed to hang on to the same ID card for almost fifteen years. The picture on that ID is of a very different me from a very different time when I didn’t need to pull out my ID so often but since COVID there are a lot more locked doors where I work and going somewhere for a meeting or even just to find a quiet place away from my desk to have lunch can mean swiping my ID half a dozen times. So it didn’t take me long to realize I’d dropped it somewhere and retracing my steps was hampered by a number of locked doors. I also needed it to get my car out of the parking garage, though the people at the card office told me I could download a parking app, submit my information, and after a 48-hour processing period would be able to use my phone to get in and out of the parking garage.

Fortunately getting a replacement card was easy and only took about five minutes and twenty-five bucks and my new card does everything the old card did except show me a younger, slimmer version of myself.

For a long time my work ID card was also a bus pass. The place where I work has an arrangement with the local transit authority to provide free service to employees. It was really easy—I just stepped onto the bus, swiped my card, and that was it, but last year someone decided that instead of allowing us to use our cards we should use a smartphone app instead. This was implemented quickly without any warning and without a chance for feedback. Still I’m sure there was a lot of careful consideration, thought, and discussion put into this and that, after weighing the pros and cons, they decided to do it anyway.

A few months ago I decided to try the new bus pass app after downloading it, submitting my information, and waiting a week for the 48-hour processing period. Then when I got on the bus and tried to scan the QR code the app generated I got an error. The driver said “That’s happening to everybody. Take a seat.” When I contacted customer service the response was, “Oh, we forgot to activate your account.” Of course any new technology is going to take time to work out the bugs.

I’m very careful with my new ID. In fact I’ve checked my wallet three times while writing this to make sure it’s still there. With any luck it’ll last until I retire, assuming they don’t decide to replace employee ID cards with a smartphone app, which is possible, and which will probably be done without any warning or opportunity for feedback. Still I’m sure there will be a lot of careful thought and consideration and after weighing the pros and cons they’ll do it anyway.

Stop And Look.

I have so many questions about the small scenes created in the hollow of a tree on a regular walking path I take regularly. Sometimes there’s nothing there, just the empty hollow, but other times there are toys. Maybe some of them have been dropped by children. Others seem to be marking the season. Did someone put them there deliberately? Is it the same person every time? Who takes them? Is it just something fun? It probably is—it’s unlikely there’s any deeper meaning, but my mind still considers the possibility that someone has a purpose in creating these scenes. I have all these questions but, as I walk on, as I pass by people on the same trail, any one of whom could be the artist, I think, some things are better left as happy mysteries.

 

Winter Stillness.

There’s no silence like that of a late winter night. It’s not muffled, as it’s so often described, though if you’re out on a late winter night you may be wrapped up in layers of wool and cotton. The silence of a late winter night is as clear and smooth as the surface of a frozen pool, and can be as sharp as the cracked edges of that same ice. Even the water in the air clings to the ground so that even a cloudy sky is deeply detailed. The stars are brighter, crystals shimmering. Jupiter directly overhead is like a lamp, and even Saturn, hanging just a few degrees away, is so distinct its rings seem like they must be visible even without a telescope.

In spring, summer, and even into late fall every night is alive all night. Crickets and katydids sing to each other, tree frogs blurp away on damp limbs, and as the night spins toward morning, even before the first hint of sun, birds start to chirp their annoyance that they’re awake before daylight. In winter there’s mostly silence. There may be the snort of a deer in the trees, the rustle of a possum or coyote, the cry of an owl. Lonely cars may hiss along the road. These sounds disappear as quickly as they come, swallowed by the stillness. It’s possible to stand outside on a late winter night, see a meteor flare across the sky, a whole world burning, and feel only the numbness. It’s possible to stand outside on a late winter night and believe that the world has dropped to absolute zero, the state where matter itself ceases all motion. It’s possible to believe the world is no longer living but is like the moon that slides like a scythe across the sky. It’s possible to stand outside on a late winter night and believe time itself has stopped.

There’s a folk tale of a man who went to the town square on a late winter night and confessed all his sins to the sky. There was only silence, his own voice muted by the stillness. When the spring thaw came his words dropped from the air, heard by everyone; for months they’d been frozen in place.

It’s only a story but I can stand outside on a cold winter night and believe it’s possible, that even words can freeze and hang in the air. There’s the threat of frostbite, of numbness, of hypothermia. I don’t want to stay out in it long but I can stand outside late on a cold winter night and feel there’s true magic in the world, that it comes to the surface when everything else is stilled.

I just wish it weren’t so damn cold.

Do You Want To Build A Snowman?

Because we don’t get snow around here very often it’s a special thing. That might explain why I’ve seen so many snow figures, and while normally I’d grumble about the ongoing cold it helped a lot of those snow figures stay around even after most of the snow that just blanketed the ground had melted away. A lot of them were the standard oversized snowballs stacked on top of each other. Many years ago I was in Russia in late December. Some friends and I went to Gorky Park and built a regular snowman using kopeks for the eyes, nose, and buttons. The Russians who walked by seemed confused by what we were doing—ours was the only snowman I saw the entire time I was there. I also wondered what Maxim Gorky himself would have thought of it. He didn’t seem to have much of a sense of humor. If only there’d been a Daniil Kharms Park…

Anyway I love creative snow sculptures like this one I found. I like to think it’s a gryphon—one of my favorite mythical beasts for obvious reasons, standing guard over the small quad where it was placed. Or maybe it’s a sphinx, though I was able to safely walk around it without having to answer any riddles.