Friday, November 4, 2005

An enduring theme of our conversations is weather and the power it wields over our temperaments. How hot or cold it feels is probably the first thing that comes to mind when you think of small talk. You say it’s going to rain soon? Why, you just uttered the mainstay of early evening, porch-front discourse. Ambient humidity, huh? Fascinating.

We spoke of Star Wars and the Force yesterday. Do you also remember The Matrix? Both flicks posit all-encompassing phenomena that bend reality and exert a power over its characters. I don’t know about you, but I have this very experience whenever I look out the window. What I see confers upon me more emotion than I’d care to admit, and weather may inform you in a similar manner. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t begin weeping or skipping as soon as I step out the door, it’s a subtler thing that infiltrates my day.

All that said, today was a sweet reprieve from the pre-winter doldrums. But it’s coming. It may even have arrived. The Chicago winter. Brutal and dismal. It’s pitch black already when I leave work, and soon it will be pitch black and bitterly cold, with the only solace derived from slipping on the ice and getting knocked unconscious. A wiser person would say, “You shouldn’t let all these externalities affect you! It’s the sunshine within that counts.” Try declaring this at a bus stop when the windchill hits negative thirty.