Great White Dispatch
Notes From Damn Near Canada
No. 46
12/31/09
I hate New Year’s. Just hate it. This crap-ass holiday depresses me more than reading The Road while watching Mystic River. After two weeks of festive good cheer, parties and presents, fireplaces and holly, you wake up January 2 and Everything. Just. Sucks.
All those Christmas decorations – glimmering symbols of fun and warmth just a week ago – now serve as reminders that you have to get back to work. Get your ass up that ladder and pull those lights down, bitch. You spend two hours sweeping up the evergreen splinters that your Christmas tree – now nothing more than a dead and brittle fire hazard – so kindly deposited all over your house when you finally evicted its rotting corpse, but your feet will still resemble that dude from Hellraiser until March. You suddenly go from having worked maybe 2 full weeks in the last 6, and now you don’t get a day off until what? Good Friday? New Year’s Day is nothing but the first of 365 Monday mornings.
And you kid yourself with these ‘resolutions.’ Let me enlighten you here: If you really need some contrived reason to do something, it ain’t gonna happen. You either want to do it or you need to do it. Making a promise to yourself just because the picture on your calendar changed isn’t the best motivation in the world. I’m the perfect example here. A few years ago, I started wearing a flab suit made of neoprene for the express purposes of hiding all my fabulous muscle definition. I really need to take it off. Problem is, I can only do that by moving my legs at a ridiculous speed for minutes at a time. Jogging. I hate jogging. HatehateHATE. Yet I live in a place seemingly custom-made for jogging. And if I haven’t been able to get off my ass and do it in the spring, summer and fall, in the middle of this land of parks and scenery, I sure as shittin’ won’t start doing it because I made a promise in the dead of winter to a baby in a golden sash. Or Dick Clark. Who do you make resolution pacts with?
Here’s an idea. Maybe we need some incentive to keep these resolutions. Say you break one. What if Dick Clark showed up in the middle of the night and showered you with stroke drool? Good god, I want to go for a subzero run just thinking about that scenario. But if the only motivation is a promise made to yourself while slurping down sauerkraut and watching Ryan ‘I am a pimp’ Seacrest, guess what? You will stay fat. You will remain at your desk. You will keep smoking. You will continue killing hobos and wearing their flesh. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with these things. I’m just saying we should all stop kidding ourselves.
Anyway. I love the holidays. Had a very nice month sequestered here in Minny. Saw some good people, got some great gifts and gave some better ones. But the holidays are over. We can hope that 2010 sucks less than 2009. But we can’t count on it. Happy New Year. Back to work.
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Sunday, December 13, 2009
I'm glovin' it (nyuk!)
Great White Dispatch
Notes From Damn Near Canada
No. 45
12/13/09
15:50
Before I moved to Minnesota, gloves were never on my list of things to worry about. Sure, if I knew I’d be spending an inordinate amount of time in the cold, like if I had to hide a body in a meat locker or keep a pair of black market kidneys iced up, I’d maybe make sure I grabbed a pair of work gloves.
But here? Holy shit. I wouldn’t be caught DEAD outside without a pair of neoprene, 750-fill power, lamb-lip-lined, water-proof, air-proof, battery-powered, one-size-fits-all babyskin gloves. Some mornings, you can’t get from your front door to the car without having to scrape the ice off your fingernails. And don’t you dare touch a doorknob out there. Not unless you plan to remodel your palms after that German guy’s in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Winter here makes you rethink a ton of things. Water pipe routes. Plow schedules. Emergency kits in your car. Ice thickness. How long its been since your car was started. Winter here is an opponent, not just some soggy bridge between fall and spring. But you deal with it. You check your propane every three days and hope to Christ that maybe the wind chill won’t drop the temps much under -15. And if it does get that cold? Screw it. You have nice gloves.
Here are some pictures, including fuzzy deer, a smartass rabbit, and some yahoos racing 'ice yachts' on ice that ain't been ice for too awful long.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
So I was wrong about the blizzard...
Great White Disptach
Notes From Damn Near Canada
No. 44
12/09/09
0847
It came. It saw. It kicked my deer blind's ass.
Here I sit at work, depite the blizzard that raged last night and is, in fact, still raging outside. I'm here despite the fact that I have the third longest and second most dangerous commute. Despite the fact that there is a snow emergency, and that Red Wing is largely deserted. Despite the fact that no one bothered to plow my road, meaning I had no clue where the road began and the Horrible Drifting Snow ended.
I have this asshole to thank:
Unlike his namesake, Ol' Oden here has never let me down. Does it have rust spots the size of a severed head on every flat surface? You bet it does. Does it take 45 minutes to heat up, even on a blistering summer day? Goddamn right. Does it plow through snow like a raped reindeer? Hell and yes. Keep in mind that the above photo was snapped over a year ago, and the rust has spread faster than Tiger's hepatitis.
Sigh. I could be sitting at home by the fire in my jammies, half drunk on cider left in the fridge since Halloween. I could be free to scratch me nuggers without first glancing in three directions. Sometimes, dropping $750 on this rattletrap snow molester doesn't seem like the wisest of choices.
Here are some pics of a snowed-under Red Wing. I'll likely be dropping in a ton more throughout the day, because goddammit, it's too damn snowy to work. Check me flicker page once in a while.
No. 44
12/09/09
0847
It came. It saw. It kicked my deer blind's ass.
Here I sit at work, depite the blizzard that raged last night and is, in fact, still raging outside. I'm here despite the fact that I have the third longest and second most dangerous commute. Despite the fact that there is a snow emergency, and that Red Wing is largely deserted. Despite the fact that no one bothered to plow my road, meaning I had no clue where the road began and the Horrible Drifting Snow ended.
I have this asshole to thank:
Unlike his namesake, Ol' Oden here has never let me down. Does it have rust spots the size of a severed head on every flat surface? You bet it does. Does it take 45 minutes to heat up, even on a blistering summer day? Goddamn right. Does it plow through snow like a raped reindeer? Hell and yes. Keep in mind that the above photo was snapped over a year ago, and the rust has spread faster than Tiger's hepatitis.
Sigh. I could be sitting at home by the fire in my jammies, half drunk on cider left in the fridge since Halloween. I could be free to scratch me nuggers without first glancing in three directions. Sometimes, dropping $750 on this rattletrap snow molester doesn't seem like the wisest of choices.
Here are some pics of a snowed-under Red Wing. I'll likely be dropping in a ton more throughout the day, because goddammit, it's too damn snowy to work. Check me flicker page once in a while.
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
The calm before
Great White Dispatch
Notes From Damn Near Canada
No. 43
12/08/09
06:25
There’s a blizzard warning in effect for pretty much the entirety of Minnesota and western Wisconsin. We’ve known about this looming monster since Sunday night, and it’s supposed to unleash hell upon us sometime between now and Thursday. When it does, it could dump 1-8 inches of snow. That’s crack meteorology right there.
A subtle edge lingers in the air, as everyone waits, breath held and shovels at the ready, for our first real snow of the season. We made it through November warm and dry. Barely even rained, mostly settling on sunny and 45ish. But we know we’ll pay for this tropical November. You opt not to wear a coat to work the week of Thanksgiving? In Minnesota? Brother, you better believe that retribution will be paid in full.
The warnings are all over the place. The quiet little brine streaks that appeared on the roads overnight. The occasional flash of orange in the distance, snowplows laying down ash and gravel. Every third pickup in the land proudly sporting a bigass shovel. The dump trucks overflowing with sawdust. Oh yeah. Gonna be a mother.
As I sit in my kitchen window on this grey, cold (but not as cold as it goddamn will be) Tuesday morning, packs of tight little flakes – barely flakes! – ease their way down to the ground. No hurry or malice in their movements as they powder the tiny doe in the yard. These flakes are just along for the ride, going where the breeze wills them. We know they’re scouts, secret warriors sent to sweet talk us into opening our doors, into embracing the true army when it arrives. We know this. We know that snowy halo on the little deer’s brow is a portent of Very Bad Things. We know this. Winter is coming. This week. And all we can do is wait.
Until then, we chew our nails and salt our walks and hope we didn’t drive our rear-wheel Chevy Toboggan to work on the day Icy Hell descends upon us all. Winter ain’t coming. Winter is here. Chain up.
Notes From Damn Near Canada
No. 43
12/08/09
06:25
There’s a blizzard warning in effect for pretty much the entirety of Minnesota and western Wisconsin. We’ve known about this looming monster since Sunday night, and it’s supposed to unleash hell upon us sometime between now and Thursday. When it does, it could dump 1-8 inches of snow. That’s crack meteorology right there.
A subtle edge lingers in the air, as everyone waits, breath held and shovels at the ready, for our first real snow of the season. We made it through November warm and dry. Barely even rained, mostly settling on sunny and 45ish. But we know we’ll pay for this tropical November. You opt not to wear a coat to work the week of Thanksgiving? In Minnesota? Brother, you better believe that retribution will be paid in full.
The warnings are all over the place. The quiet little brine streaks that appeared on the roads overnight. The occasional flash of orange in the distance, snowplows laying down ash and gravel. Every third pickup in the land proudly sporting a bigass shovel. The dump trucks overflowing with sawdust. Oh yeah. Gonna be a mother.
As I sit in my kitchen window on this grey, cold (but not as cold as it goddamn will be) Tuesday morning, packs of tight little flakes – barely flakes! – ease their way down to the ground. No hurry or malice in their movements as they powder the tiny doe in the yard. These flakes are just along for the ride, going where the breeze wills them. We know they’re scouts, secret warriors sent to sweet talk us into opening our doors, into embracing the true army when it arrives. We know this. We know that snowy halo on the little deer’s brow is a portent of Very Bad Things. We know this. Winter is coming. This week. And all we can do is wait.
Until then, we chew our nails and salt our walks and hope we didn’t drive our rear-wheel Chevy Toboggan to work on the day Icy Hell descends upon us all. Winter ain’t coming. Winter is here. Chain up.
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