Event Horizon

Apparently everyone here is awaiting the arrival of the snow. There seems to be a general, decided, anticipatory feel to the air. Snowpocalypse? Spring necrosis? Inevitably, this will have to be something, and those more profit and now motivated than myself will make some cash off of it.

Your life used to happen, and there were disruptions and occasionally widely shared experiences. People of my age and up all seem to remember 1978's blizzard. It's name? The Blizzard of '78. Not very original. A lot of the people I know or have known remember Vanessa Williams becoming Miss America--not simply because she is black, and was the first black Miss America--she was also so obviously a hag and a stunningly beautiful one at that. I think she was the first honestly beautiful Miss America. She didn't look as if she needed to sleep in plastic wrap or hose her hair down with floor finisher every morning. When those pictures came out, we loved her even more.

Your life now, though, is an event horizon--one in which named people and products and storms move with somewhat unequal rapidity or gravitas, effect or affect. If you're in the area of this snowfall which is associated with a storm named X (I just don't happen to know this storm name), it will be brought to you, or hyped to you, endlessly, by these sponsors, this station or that  paper. Online, you'll read 3, 4 or more trajectory reports and variations based upon possibilities in the general West-East weather flow.

Charles was considering pushing me into a hotel room in town tonight because this house has a tendency to lose power whenever it storms--there's some weak peculiarity in this part of the neighborhood. We've lost power in heavy rain before! Of course I don't want to fork out $100 to stay in Bloomington freaking Indiana! That's like paying for the privilege of pain. So the compromise is, if I must, I must...unfortunately right now with a trach, I have to run humidity when I sleep, and I have to be able to suction, and as for the no heat thing, right now is not a good time for me and no heat to collide.

But it's yet to be proven, and won't be for some time, that the 12 inch snow they call for here won't turn out to be a 3 inch kiss, or a 5 inch so-what. It's happened before. If you watch Indianapolis local news, they flog the be-jesus out of any possibility of flurries such that you will swear if you don't buy bread and milk on the way home, you might starve before you manage the next exit of your driveway. These are not weather events--these are Kroger Events. These are moments designed to drive you into Kroger where you may say you're buying bread and milk, but that must be a Little Debbie Sandwich you're eating with that bread and you must be reverse engineering that milk out of Haagen Daz.

It is funny how marketing allows us to lie to ourselves, isn't it? It seems just yesterday that advertising was supposedly designed to allow us to indulge or discover, or appeal to our DIY instincts to improve. Now, it's just a ubiquitous tool that allows us to make each thing that happens as stressful as possible, so that we can eat as much junk food as possible to get through it. That's not the season-ending championship football game you're watching, it's a chicken wings event.

I look forward to joining back into the fray of eating the most vile crap I can get my hands on. At least for a day or two. After a few weeks of Nutren in a tube, I've found myself craving the worst food--get this--I'm dying for KFC. Yes. KFC. I didn't even eat KFC when I could eat it before--I don't know why I want it. Perhaps in the twilight of one of my hospital nights, eyes half shut but not able to sleep,  they ran their commercials extra hard. Perhaps some one in Indianapolis was murdered and they were caught by the KFC Crime Cam, I just don't know.

I will though tell myself that today's snowfall is brought to me by fresh blueberries and asparagus. That tonight's morphine elixir is sponsored by lean 6 oz serving of chicken breast with a seed of quinoa. That the way I feel about cancer is a product of Smoothies made with fruit and yogurt. And today's good news is that I honestly do want a healthy snack of pistachios.