Bomb Cyclone

10:09 p.m. December 24^th. It felt good to run today. All the ice had melted. Yesterday there was so much ice I couldn’t make it to the end of the driveway. It was much warmer today. About 45 degrees. It was raining heavily but I had to go. I hadn’t run for three days. I don’t even want to weigh myself. I’ve been gobbling food like there’s no tomorrow. R's mince cookies especially. R's rain jacket was too thin to do much good but she brought an umbrella. She ran ok with the umbrella but the awkwardness of the umbrella combined with the bag of peanuts she was carrying proved too much and she turned back home. The combination of it being Christmas Eve day and the rain emptied the streets of pedestrians. Not much traffic either. So it was much more relaxing than usual. And no crows begging for peanuts. They remained high in the air having fun with currents. I left a few at a couple of key spots, in case they come out later. 

And to think that less than a month ago we had to get up early to for a run and avoid the heat. It was always in the 80s in Kauai. I carried a bottle of water. Palm fronds trembled in the breeze. Roosters and hens and their progeny dashed across Lawai Road. Early morning surfers returned to their cars. I dove into the Pacific when we returned. The water was warm. It felt fantastic. 

I watch a large white snake coil itself around a young woman in a black dress. Chelsea Wolfe.  Singing “Hypnos.” “I licked your hatred. You set me free. In summer, in the boiling blood.” 

Bomb Cyclone Leaves America Powerless reads a headline on YouTube. Eighteen dead. Buffalo, New York got 22.3 inches of snow in one day. Cars and trucks sliding all over highways and freeways. Collisions everywhere. One small hill in our neighborhood got four crashes within hours of one another. Scenes of powdery ethereal snow blown wispily and crazily over dark asphalt as if in some apocalyptic dream. Thousands of canceled flights. People sleeping on the floor at international airports. Icicles on bridge railings. Transformers exploding from the cold. In Texas a homeless man in a wheelchair fell into a fire pit. Sedan spins down a street hitting two parked cars. And day before yesterday I saw a man driving without chains down icy 8^th Avenue West and turn toward an oncoming car while gazing at his smartphone. A train derailed after hitting a truck in Collegedale, Tennessee. Train 55 from Ottawa to Toronto stopped after a tree fell on it. Emergency services provided food & water, but those supplies soon ran out, & the toilets had stopped working. A train derailment near Grafton blocked all trains in Kingston. Iguanas dropping out of trees frozen and dead in Florida. Homes buried in snow in Buffalo. 

It's hard to believe that such a fragile thing as a snowflake can cause so much mayhem. One might think of it as an equation of collective action. There are roughly 22,400 snowflakes in a pound of snow. Multiply this by a factor of infinite flakes in a cold uncaring universe and you will begin to see the problem of existence as a problem of precarious quantification. In physics, a jerk equation is the minimal setting for solution showing coffeehouse behavior. Try it with rubber. This will only work if you forget everything you know about dynamical systems & stretch it as far as you can. Then, after you let go, you won’t notice yourself crashing through the window. And what will you have proved? The anxiety of death is a farce. Said the Snowman.