Friday, January 14, 2005

Right now? It’s five degrees Fahrenheit. Five goddamn degrees, each of which should be treasured like a newborn child. Weather.com tells me it “feels like -8°F,” and I’m thankful for the tactile clarification. I probably would’ve preferred the temperature to feel more like “5°F,” but I guess Christmas is over.

Five degrees Fahrenheit. In human terms, that’s 27°F below freezing. Death. In dog terms, it’s death. In dog years, it’s about 265. In cat terms, it’s -9. In bird terms, it’s a clean glass window. Even for bacteria, we’re talking about streptococci gathering at their local bar, frozen flagella clasped valiantly around cups of TheraFlu, and dying. I know because I asked them.

I started scraping my car windows this morning, heartily so, until I realized the frozen sheet of water was inside. Disheartened but not defeated, I pried open my doors and dutifully removed the ice from the windows. I finished the last one, tossed my scraper in the car, and shut the door. I shut it again. I shut it a third time, a fourth time, even a tenth. It wouldn’t close. The inner workings had somehow frozen, and the stupid little latch that held the door closed had given up the ghost.

After slamming my door about two dozen times, half of which were accompanied by a string of very cold expletives, the latch finally took. I had won. And woke half the neighborhood in the process.

Stay indoors today, gentle reader, lest you fuse yourself to some metallic object or simply crumple to the ground. Stay indoors and play this. If nothing else, it’s a fascinating sociological experiment. Do people build up each other, bolster one another’s literary efforts, or do they actively try to foil other spellers’ attempts at “dick” while trying to construct “tits” in their own feverish rush?