Chilling

Nothing is chill right now except the weather

It is so cold you can go snowtopping. That’s what my friends and I named snow so frozen you can walk atop it and your boot doesn’t break through—snowtoppers. It has been extremely cold for a surprisingly long stretch. I’m doing a pretty good job of staying positive about it, but to do so requires a caloric intake that will cause me great remorse in a few months. That, however, is a problem for future me. For now, I highly recommend Trader Joe’s Chocolate Hazelnut cookies.

To truly commit to the cold AF bit, I read The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller (lovely cover, by the way). It’s set in 1962 England, when the country had its “Big Freeze,” the country’s coldest winter in 200 years. Two young couples live across a farm field from eachother–one couple is the town doctor and his pregnant wife; the other couple is a rookie farmer and his pregnant wife. It sounds like a settled little homey tale, but in fact everyone seems to be trying out their new identities like ill-fitting costumes. The farmer is a little afraid of his livestock, the young wives can’t believe this is their lives, the doctor is a giant dick. The devastating winter storm is the explicit backdrop, but the implicit and far more interesting one is the post-war timing. England is turning the corner, away from the devastation of WW2 and the intense hardship of the years immediately following it. These young adults don’t want to talk about the war, they don’t want to hear about the Holocaust, they don’t like to think about their own family’s murky pasts. Like all young people, they are looking ahead.

That resistance to understanding their very recent history felt relevant, as did the sense that things were about to change but no one really knew how. We read the story knowing that just around the bend is so much change–the Beatles, the sexual revolution, feminism, civil rights. The characters, however, just naively exist in the vague discomfort of ill-fitting costumes. The doctor’s wife envies her sister’s life in America–she has a job, a purpose. The world’s most unlikely farmer’s wife devours sci-fi novels, a genre that was itself relatively new in the early 1960s. The farmer wants to automate and scale his farm, even though he barely knows how to manage the ornery bull and few cows he currently owns. And everyone drinks way way way too much. To read scene after scene of the pregnant ladies smoking ciggies, throwing back gins, and popping pills was both comic and disturbing. We humans can be so stupid.

A wildly boozy holiday party and the first blizzard send the novel in so many unexpected directions. I thought I was going to tuck into a quiet internal novel of manners with lots of lovely descriptions of snow. It is considerably more action-packed than that. It does still have some terrific writing about snow. I mean, he never rose to the level of coming up with a name like snowtoppers, but whatever.

If, like me, reading about people on a warm sunny beach when you’re wearing long johns might hurt your feelings, I suggest you check this novel out. It’s also not a long one, which allows me to continue to limit my definition of “productivity” to “how many books I have read.”

Protest is Not Domestic Terrorism

A recent playlist Spotify delivered me started with “Black Boys on Mopeds,” the sad beautiful Sinead O’Connor song that is tragically still completely relevant. And these two lyrics stand out:

These are dangerous days
To say what you feel is to dig your own grave

The list of assaults on our nation by this administration is astonishing. The corruption (the Melania film reviews almost make this vulgar flagrant bribe worth it), the authoritarianism, the deranged rambling shittiness of our president, and worst of all the latest dump of Epstein documents. Maybe there is a person at DoJ who is bravely trying to get the truth out there, because what just came out about Trump is shocking and revolting. I didn’t think that man had the capacity to shock or revolt me anymore, but if these allegations are true, he raped 13-year-old girls.

It seems everything keeps getting worse, and somehow we all just keep playing along. Those of us on the left wring our hands and wish someone would do something; those on the right admire their stock portfolios and twist themselves into knots to justify all the violations of our Constitution. Where does this all lead? Will it all combust into a new civil war? Or will we just let things molder until America is a sad shadow of its former self? Can we turn things around?

Time for more cookies.