Jack Frost

It’s 11 AM and it’s negative six degrees outside on December 16. Inside, Jack Frost has left his mark on all the windowpanes and serves as a symbolic reminder that some days it’s simply too cold to adhere to your own rules and jump outside for a smoke (or at least open a window, FGS). We’ll have plenty of atoning to do later, but for now no one is here.

--Flashback…Second grade, Mrs. Reade writing any words kids need help spelling on the board during her dreaded impromptu writing assignments. Even at seven and eight my fellow kids gave a collective snort-snuff-snicker when I put up my hand and asked or the correct spelling of ‘no one.’—

Snow, thinly, covers the storybook-triangle roofs of the neighborhood houses, duplexes and fourplexes and blends almost imperceptibly with the off-white of the smooth overcast wherever the slopes can break free of the spindly brown oak branches that hem in this low-rise jam. Inside, too, there’s monotony: no sooner has CNN given it back to the smart young ambiguously-raced anchorwoman than (after a few obligatory words) the even smarter guys behind the camera shuffle off to an hours-old loop of the president-elect’s newsconference on the education-department-to-be or whatever. Good speech, the talking heads bleat, and good ed-sec pick besides: one more competent Chicagoan on the team.

Sometime during the past week, without fanfare, some of these same guys have made the considerably more consequential decision to strip down the channel’s on-screen presentation. The newsbar at the bottom has shrunk to make room for no-nonsense block-letter ledes for the anchorperson’s audio—a sign of the times, a new look for the Obama era perhaps? Ah, but what would Fox have to say about it? The weatherman relates the havoc wreaked across the country by the unseasonable & unreasonable cold. Do you—hot anchorchick or all-you-out-there or maybe both, it’s not totally clear—know that it snowed yesterday in Las Vegas, he asks, or that it’s nearly zero degrees Fahrenheit right now in Amarillo, Texas? Even he didn’t, not before he checked the computers this morning, lips pursed at the rim of his personal CNN mug, eyes narrowed dutifully. He could go on for forty-five minutes about all this crazy weather, he assures us. (Just make sure to keep your eyes down and your walk brisk and steady when you pass him in the parking lot.) But alas. Channeling the dour personalities behind the lens, Miss Congeniality gently reminds him that there’s other news to be had today, Amarillo be damned. He knows, he knows. He smiles thinly. He’s hurt. She returns the smirk at about seventy percent, her eyes dead. These two surely don’t make it past smile-and-nod when they pass in the Company’s polished corridors. Maybe they don’t even look up.

Who knows, though; maybe they slam in the bathroom a couple times a week and don’t want their significant others to find out. The cigarette opens up the bowels, but I don’t want to be alone so I grab a copy of Best American Non-Required Reading 2003 Edition, a collegiate re-gift if there ever was one, for the ordeal. It takes a while to find a story that looks good—drivel, drivel, okay, drivel—and by that time I’m almost done, but it’s a lazy day so I allow myself the luxury and draw it out. Nothing is happening today anyway. The clouds aren’t even moving. The weathermap is deep purple; people are taking it easy. It’s hard to see out the scrambled glass of the bathroom window, but every once in a while it’s clear that a car slides by erratically, skipping over the icy snow mixture the city hasn’t even bothered sanding or plowing. It’s too cold for that shit anyway.