The town seemed the color of solder moved the wrong way under the iron, a flat metallic alloy, and the people seemed as if they were made out of the same alloy. A weaker man might let himself believe that the cold winds dipping down from Canada carried with them the moist hint of a spring from some faraway place, but the brown grass and patches of snow lasted well into May, sometimes June, each year. Weaker men didn’t last too long in the winter. Nothing did, without showing considerable wear.

-Me

If Life were a weatherman on a nighttime feel-good newscast, he or she might have declared that today had been cancelled ‘due to lack of interest’.

It’s that old winter ennui, clumsily colliding with me earlier and earlier each year.

Time was it wouldn’t strike me until that dreadful point in March when the novelty of big flakes falling silently has entirely vanished. Indeed, the big flakes themselves have entirely vanished – at that ugly time of the year the snow arrives, like Santa, long after all have retired for the evening. When you wake up in the morning then, at the dog-ass end of winter, you discover that that the schmutz-colored dirty snow has been covered with a wonderland blanket of frosty white while you slept, but the Christmas-card perfection comes with the sad and cynical realization that underneath the virgin white goodness outside continue to lie the cigarette butts, candy wrappers and used condoms that rains can usually wash away.

Lately, as I grow older, that sick feeling comes earlier and earlier.

I remember the first winter I lived on my own, in Minneapolis, working two jobs and hellish 16-hour days as I tried to earn enough money to get myself back into college after my creative student loan self-financing had briefly turned sour on me (though it wouldn’t actually entirely collapse until weeks before my final exit and graduation, leaving me with an ugly three-class degree gap that remained for another ten years, until I finally was able to repay my huge debt and finish up at another, less expensive, school.

In February that winter, before even the hint of spring, I’d be driving from one job to the next in a car whose heater no longer worked. The big news was the brutal ax murders of David Brom’s family in Rochester, an hour or so south. It was quickly discovered that young David had done the deed himself, and then, bizarrely prefiguring the later life-on-the-lam of spree killer Andrew Cunanan, it was said he had disguised himself in a wig and makeup in a futile attempt to avoid arrest.

My overwhelming thought during that media circus was of Bob Dylan’s unfortunate comment at a Bill Of Rights dinner in New York, December 1963.

I have to be to be honest, I just got to be, as I got to admit that the man who shot President Kennedy, Lee Oswald, I don't know exactly where --what he thought he was doing, but I got to admit honestly that I too - I saw some of myself in him.

I understood what Bob was saying. I saw a little of myself in David Brom, too. As I drove from one mind-numbing job to the next to home and fitful sleep only to get up the next day and do it all over again. I was in the last throes of the end of my relationship with my first girlfriend, via uncomfortable long-distance phone calls and I had no contact with anyone but the people I worked with. I felt tremendously alone and adrift and I felt like I could understand the sudden snap that would occur, leading me to ax my family or my friends or even a group of complete strangers.

And that’s kinda the way I feel about that dull and unpleasant period during the formal season of winter (Winter Solstice through Vernal Equinox). So forgive me as I hibernate, only occasionally stirring to stumble to the keyboard and proclaim or rant.

See you. I’ll be around.