Snow Event

Early morning, deep night, whatever you call it, I get up to pee and flip on the back porch light. Something is different and I don't see it right away, then realize all trace of my passage is disappeared. Like a character in a Jack London story, my footsteps, whatever imprint my feet might have made, are/is completely covered. New snow covers everything to a depth I can't quite calculate. What, exactly, is a drift? Is everything adrift? I've experienced more snow than this, in Telluride we calculated the depth in feet, not inches, and once, on the Vineyard, a serious storm dumped 16 inches in a single night, and a dump find, a shattered statue of Don Quixote was completely buried, but I have never been so completely isolated as this. No question I won't get out tomorrow, later today, because the first phase of this storm is only projected through the next eight hours, and it's all snow. My plan is to fix a large breakfast and read Proust. I'll need to split some frozen wood and bring it inside, bitch about the cold, cook some grits, take a walk in the winter wonderland. Nothing changes, everything's the same, very like a whale. White is white, right? The snow keeps falling. Ended up not reading Proust but "The Printing Press As An Agent Of Change" instead. A 700 page book with a 60 page bibliography, heavily foot-noted, perfect for a serious snow day. Requires countless trips to the 11th Britannica, trying, and sometimes succeeding, to find other books, pursue tangents. I did suit-up and split a rick of wood for the house, frigid out, windy; and bringing 100 pounds of frozen wood inside is a lot like bringing a really large block of ice into your living room. The top layer of snow is very clean, so I fill a five-gallon bucket, set it next to the stove, add to it as it slowly melts, and melt snow on the stove top in a large canning kettle. The drain freezes again and that allows me to mark my yard with that clear indicator of rural poverty: a tear-drop shaped frozen lump that is my slops. Between 1517 and 1520 Luther's thirty publications sold 300,000 copies. The Reformation was built on the printing press. The Ninety-Five Theses were not so much tacked to the door as distributed hand to hand. The Broadside. In the area of yard where I go out to pee, I'm trying to recreate Mount Rushmore with piss on virgin snow. It's not going well, my Teddy looks more like Taft. The house is comfortable to me, at 58 degrees, it's often in the 40's when I get up, it's all about how you dress. Thomas Aquinas staged his great come-back, the 'Council Of Trent', with the help of the printing press. Great name for a rock group, "Thomas Aquinas" and their first, platinum, album "Council Of Trent", followed by "The Diet Of Worms" and "The Defenestration Of Prague". Being snow-bound is such fun. I'm not answerable. All the ground-cover is mounded. Everything looks like a breast at rest. In the oral tradition, everyone wanted to be a preacher, in the printed age, everyone had a spin. Erasmus was there, at the beginning, proofing his on copy. All the schisms, all the heresies, Calvin wasn't even a monk, a lay dude, swept Switzerland like a snow-storm. How much mediation between you and god? Even I, believing nothing but rabbit tracks, when faced with an untenable situation, cry out "Oh God" as if it might protect me against the void. A pessimist with a sense of humor. Irony is a suitable refuge, sarcasm, pointed criticism; but it all misses the point, when what you're trying to do is stay alive. After my walk today, particularly beautiful, I was soaking my feet in warm water, restoring life, and I was crying, because the pain was so exquisite. For a lapsed Romantic I'm amazingly labile. I cry for ice that must disappear, for birds out of season, for the buds that appear too soon, the woodchuck that rises on its hind feet only to be struck in the head by my bumper, a frog that misjudges the weather and fucks too soon. Dude, didn't we tell you, there's always a hard freeze after the first thaw. Lost power last night. Better SEND this now.