Opinion

Why do we stay in this area when it is so horribly cold? When I went to walk the dog this morning it was -35 with the wind chill. And then the dog would not cooperate and just hurry up and do his business so we could get back to the house. No. We walked 4 blocks and still nothing. Even with all the layers that I had on, it was dreadfully cold. I have been careful to cover most of my face so I haven’t had any frostbite. When I’m outside, I move pretty quickly. According to the meteorologists we will begin to slowly warm up so that by Friday we may actually get into single digits above zero.

I seldom invite friends to come to church with me and, after Sunday’s morning service that was so deeply moving, I don’t know why. If you knew a great bakery, you’d tell people. If you read a great book, you wouldn’t keep it a secret. But off I truck to the West Side of Manhattan and in the big door past the greeters, drop my two cents in the offering plate, head altarward, stop at my pew, genuflect and bow, and take my seat.

Last weekend, my first born child returned from a deployment overseas, arriving from a warm, sandy place to upstate New York, only to be greeted with a large amount of snow, and very cold temperatures. It’s strange to be grateful for cold weather and snow, but he was.

While it’s very hard to convince the blind of the fact, the importance of visual art in this life cannot be overstated. Visual art is as limitless as the human imagination, seen with the eyes but felt in the bones, speaks to the mind but beats with a heart. Some say the visual art of Mark Rothko were made for the soul.

Las Vegas, Nevada. The Little White Wedding Chapel. Rob waits in his car in the drive-thru. The driver of the convertible ahead of him honks several times, excited, joyous. The couple shares a kiss, takes a handful of selfies, pops open a bottle of champagne, and drives off.

I’ve just finished a ten-day solo tour down South as the World’s Oldest Stand-Up and it was a major adventure for an old guy with memory issues who keeps forgetting the word “cognitive” and other words of a similar sort, walking onstage every night to do ninety minutes or more freestyle in front of a big crowd, most of whom probably voted the wrong way last November, and make them laugh a lot.

I’ve heard a lot about the owl “irruption” in Northern Minnesota and so on my recent trip to “up north”, I was excited at the prospect of seeing the owls that live in the boreal forest in Canada visiting Minnesota.

Moving out of an apartment as I’ve been doing recently convinces me at last to resign from American consumer culture and live with only bedding, one towel, two changes of clothing, a pair of shoes, and one suit to wear for shows and also to be buried in. Stationery, stamps, and a couple pens. I own 21 coffee cups; I only need one. Nothing plastic, thank you. I will still fly Delta but I’ll lose 25 pounds to lessen the load.

Well, winter is back again. And I guess that’s okay. It was too early for spring. The plants get confused. The animals get confused. And I certainly am already confused.

“The only measure that he knows is desire—desire for power.” — Gandalf