The Phenomenology of Winter

II. How it feels to be something on

Sometime in January, 2006

Meul,

My flight from Newark to Detroit was marked by great comfort and the beautiful winter sun flooding the skies at 30,000 feet. I knew Detroit would be cloudy because the pilot said it would. I was prepared for that. But I didn't think that shit would last fourteen days. I'm losing it. For the first time in all my memory, the site of the thick, foggy mat of clouds in the sky this morning driving down the street made me feel like I was on the verge of flipping out like I was in the fifth day without water, or that stranded on a raft in the middle of the Indian Ocean following some TIF shipwreck my willpower collapsed as I plunged my face into the salty seas and took long, deep gulps of saltwater, only to cause severe delusion and violent hallucinations mere hours later as my body kamikazzied its last wits in the throes of dehydration. It made me feel like I was strapped to a chair in an empty, abandoned Soviet state hospital in the northern Baltic circle with a tape recorder in each ear playing a tape of Bush saying the word 'freedom' over and over and over and over again. I wasn't ready for fourteen days of this merda. My break, initially steeped in the optimistic hopes to reroot in the land and get my final papers done in hermitage, has given way to lethargy and sure weight gain. If I was not me, I'd be sitting in the basement right now smoking reefer and watching porno. This weather will get to you, no doubt. No doubt about it. I don't remember winter being this despairing from childhood, and I certainly didn't expect to get blindsided and drowned by the fucking constant saturation of drizzle fog and winterdew. Outside is the color of a rotting corpse. I may have no choice but to leave home and become a crow, or possibly a raven.

Your pal,
Patrick