see, this journal entry will be almost exclusively weather related. and not my usual, ‘oh, look at the weather, isn’t it interesting’ sort of banality.
today we have the ‘kick-ass new york is buried in snow’ weather thread.
last night the blizzard was raging and the wind was so strong that it actually woke me up. this howling and shredding wind blowing the snow against my windows and skylights, and on some deep atavistic level i felt so secure, being warm and protected in bed while the furies were raging outside. it felt like an assault.
and kelly and i had this plan that we were going to spend the day at teany playing cards and cleaning, cos we assumed that teany would be slow, for who would venture out into a blizzard looking for food and tea? but we were wrong. teany was busy and i spent my morning chopping focaccia and strawberries and shoveling the sidewalk in front of teany. i haven’t shovelled snow since 1985.
and i tried to get on to my roof to shovel off my skylights, but the door to my roof wouldn’t open cos it has a 3 foot (1 meter) snow drift up against it.
it’s been said a million times, but there really isn’t a better place to be in a blizzard than manhattan. a blizzard in the suburbs meansthat you’re stranded. a blizzard in manhattan means that you put on your warm boots and clothes and wander around and see other people in boots and warm clothes (and occassionally cross-country skis) and if you’re hungry you go walk through the snow to a restaurant and if you’re movie-ing you walk through the snow to see a movie and etc.
and when it snows in manhattan you only encounter people at their best.
people borrowing shovels and laughing as they fall into urban snow banks and smiling at each other as they pass on the street, in a quiet sort of communion that basically says, ‘isn’t this amazing?’
only a few cars are out and about. and a few intrepid yuppies are parading in their suv’s feeling even more like masters of the universe until their suv’s get bogged down in a snow-bank and they have to call a tow-truck so that they can resume their master-of-the-universe-ing.
the only downside to the blizzard is that my apartment is dark, as all of my skylights are covered in 2 feet of snow. so the light in my apartment is igloo-ish in that it’s being filtered through a lot of snow.
tomorrow i’ll fight my way onto my roof and shovel off my skylights, which in many ways is kind of the ultimate expression of arbitrary urban living.
shoveling snow off of your skylights.
oh,there goes the wind again. it’s so loud it almost sounds like giant waves breaking against my building.
-moby