Winter Redux

Well, it has arrived only a day short of the solstice. Winter. The season when New York City squats over her citizens and takes a big, frosty dump.

In my last post, I mentioned how Orcs are a lot like New York City in the wintertime and I wasn’t really exaggerating. People’s faces morph into these dour, miserable moues. They’re rude and crude and would knock over a 97 year-old woman on the subway to get a seat. The smell of the city changes, and not in a good way. New York City almost never smells what one would call “good.” But the cold makes it easier to deal with, I suppose. It’s better than smelling hot, ripe summer trash and then getting onto a subway at the end of the day with a subway car full of manual laborers. That’s always pleasant.

New York is dark and colder than a witch’s tit in winter. Every year I swear I’ll never go through it again, and here I am, entering into my third winter in New York. There are countless bottles of lotions to be applied to my dry, pasty-white skin; thousands of puffs to take off my inhaler, which enables me to breathe in the frigid, spiky air; at least 120 nights of covers on/covers off thrashing, the result of radiator heat that pipes up into our little apartment directly from Hell and can only be warded off by an open window, hence my late night blanket arguments…the list goes on.

Of course, there are positives. I spend less money because I go out even less than I do now, which is to say that my social life grinds to a halt. I read more, for some reason. New York City after a snowfall is gorgeous. Until the next day when you are commuting to work with the Orcs. But I think I’ll be able to handle it better this year than in years past. And would you like to know why?

Because I have me this fine little iPod, y’all. Ain’t nothin’ gonna break’a my stride, nobody gonna slooooow me down, whoa no! My iPod keeps me moovin’!