I guess somebody was listening to my recent whine. For the last two mornings I’ve gone out to my car to find the windshield covered with 2-3mm of ice, to say nothing of the cold rain that has deterred me from cutting up the tree branches cluttering the front yard.

Today I was also very nearly treated to a no-hands faceplant into the office door, thanks to an invisible, gelid, low-friction sheet of dihydrogen monoxide coating the walkway. So to the powers that be: thank you for the cold weather, and, ha ha, yes, I’ve enjoyed your little exercises in irony. Now can I just have some plain vanilla cold air? You didn’t have to be dicks about it.

I vividly remember part of someone else’s life. Of several people’s lives, actually, and I never knew them, nor did they ever know me. They may not remember the moment themselves, but the memory has not faded for me nigh on a quarter-century later.

It was an epiphanic moment many years ago. I was thirteen or so, sitting in the back seat of the family station wagon, heading home from Disneyland. With nothing better to do, I spent the trip idly staring out the window at the passing scenery, none of it remarkable. During a slow stretch of traffic on an overpass somewhere in Orange County, I saw a small group of teenagers languidly walking down a street together, doing nothing in particular. Their movements were casual, carefree.

As I watched them stroll down the pavement in the fading, warm summer sun, I wondered what they were up to. They seemed happy. Was I watching some singular moment in their lives, unwittingly witness to a moment they would remember and cherish forever? I didn’t know, and never will. Since that time, though, the thought of billions of people, all living their unique lives at the same time, all of us so remarkably similar yet still discrete individuals, has never ceased to amaze me. I suppose it was my first profound realization, a grokking, if you will, that the world did not begin and end with me, an abrupt termination of natural childhood egocentrism. An unbidden blossoming of empathy. The human world, unfolded.

Since that time I have had a particular fascination with unposed “slice of life” snapshots. A while ago I found Gene McSweeney’s haunting collection of Lost Films, and have been hungry for more of the same. Happily, Square America landed in my lap this morning, and I’ve been happily sifting through the candid images of people long dead, half-consciously reconstructing their emotions and lives from nothing more than an anonymous photograph.

It’s a beautifully haunting experience, looking through these; every snapshot a bittersweet morsel of time, a peek into somebody’s vanished past. I can’t get enough of this stuff.

I’m getting sick of the “sticky” posts on the sidebar. They’re static, and I’m tired of having to manually update the page to swap ‘em out, so it’s either going away or going to change significantly.

I also have to make some other back-end changes to accomodate I-fucking-E, so the site might look strange and broken over the weekend. Or more brokener, if you use IE. Which I really wish you wouldn’t.

Besides consenting to marrying me, my wife engages in one other trashy pleasure: watching Wife Swap. I won’t elucidate further about this horrible little bit of pop fodder; I’ll assume that you, gentle reader, are already familiar with its premise.

Suffice it to say that the show is a constant procession of freaks, monomaniacs, and losers. Lowbrow stuff, this, disposable and forgettable, until I watched the most recent episode, which pitted a family of urban fops against a band of rural Luddites. The latter ate a home-raised, all-raw diet (including poultry and meat), shunned chemicals of any kind, and embraced bacterial growth and the concept of cross-contamination as part of God’s great natural design. Hippie living, basically, only without the hippies.

Even though I wouldn’t willingly live like that, I understand it, or at least I understood, until Mrs. Ludd explained why she placed the practice of drinking water on the same abhorrent level as the application of pesticides and industrial detergents: "Water is a solvent… It also dehydrates you."

What. The. Fuck.

Water is a nearly-universal (if weak) solvent, I’ll grant you that… but to claim that water has dehydrating properties is far beyond absurd, delving deep into the territory of the stupid. I heard that almost two days ago and I’m still flabbergasted that anybody could make such an astoundingly asinine statement.

After spending part of the weekend redecorating the kitchen, I have a couple of tips for anyone who might be considering putting up wallpaper to spruce things up:

1. Fuck off.
2. Die.

Seriously, fuck wallpaper and the roll it came in on. At least the kitchen wasn’t nearly as big a pain in the ass as the atrocious cutesy crap the previous owners put in their kids’ rooms—they used so much adhesive on those walls, I scraped half of the knockdown texture off the drywall getting the damned paper off—but it was still a hassle. Please, for the love of God (and anyone who might purchase your house), use paint, not paste. Just say NO to wallpaper.

OK. I know the Northeast is still digging out from under a fuck-ton of snow, but it is not winter right now at my house. It’s 70°F out on my back deck at almost half past nine in the evening. It feels like early June, not mid-February.

It’s comfortable, I’ll give it that, but it’s also sort of freaking me out. I like winter; my body runs hot, and this is the one time of year I am supposed to be getting to feel refreshing, crisp air all the time. This is not winter. This is weird. I want my winter back.