By God, the weather has been fooling with me quite a bit in the past few weeks!

Make up your damned mind, says I.

See: Just last week, I tell you, it was damn near blistering outside. I checked my mail in a t-shirt! It’s the only time I ever go outside when Old Man Winter is breathing down my neck. It used to be, in the summertime months, that I would stroll around the neighborhood in pants that felt like pajamas (corduroys, folks), munching on a Gala apple like a deep-breathing fiend. The neighbors never said much about it — they never say anything about anything, come to think of it. The old man two rows down would suck down his cigarette and glare at me like he hated my shape, or the music of my teeth. He’d sit there, arms crossed, seething with hatred at the fact that a post-war baby has his own townhouse, and by God, checks his own mail!

That was then, though. Now, who in hell knows what’s going on outside. There was seven inches of the powdery white stuff on the ground, just two days ago. The sun has had its way with most of the leftovers, and the snowplow man has done what the snowplow man does best — covered it in chemicals and sand and mixed it all together with every shade of Hell! It looks like the streets have mounds of coal just piled up every which way. Snow really only looks fantastic when it has first fallen, huh?

And now Dante has walked into my living quarters to inform me that it is to snow tomorrow night, for God’s sake! And again on Friday night. A few showers, he says, and it will continue into Sunday morning. That sounds positively fantastic, I say! Now, will there be a hurricane and a few God damned tornadoes thrown in midweek just for the hell of it? The weather seems to think this sort of flip-flopping behavior is perfectly acceptable!

It was almost sixty degrees just one week ago, and then the rains came rushing in and washed our sunny days away. Now it’s just snowy and warped. This geographical dot on the planet has no idea what to do with itself, and it’s making me shit-bricking confused as well. I’m confused!

Before I stop talking about the weather — the only thing that uninteresting people ever talk about with uninteresting people (whom they barely even know on any meaningful level of human companionship), I just want to again remark that I’m delighted at the recent snowfall. Dante has told me — and I’m just going to have to believe him, here — that he thinks it may be a significant amount of snowfall. I consider five inches to be significant, because it pushes me into a place of thinking that warns me, calmly, in a tranquil voice, that I shouldn’t leave the house, because what in the hell else are you going to do other than stay home, jackass? and that it’s perfectly acceptable if I put on oatmeal-colored clothing and sip tea from the center of my bed while wrapped in a microfiber blanket, enjoying imaginary worlds on my television. This is all I ever want out of a weekend, man. When it snows, what the hell else matters other than what is available to you in your home?

I think that having six-to-twelve inches of crunchy water on the ground is reason enough to just be. Every time it snows, and how relatively rare this is, someone I know (and I know so few, these days) utters something deplorable about “being bored” and “man, this blows!” Hey, fuck you! Pick up a book, asshole! Do some push-ups!

People like that take their girlfriends to Applebees and offer to pay for the meal, like they’re doing them a God damned favor!

People like that look at themselves in the mirror and think their facial hair looks pretty decent, when they can’t really even grow facial hair!

People like that only like music because the lyrics are dimly, vaguely related to the things going on in their own lives!

Snow is great! Snow is a valid excuse to shut down many of the overhead processes in the brain and just be in a place that you want to be! Sheesh, and here we’ve got these mouth-breathing knuckle-draggers saying that they’d rather take their girlfriends to Applebees, because Applebees has “date meals” on the menu. What a crock of shit, I say. You may as well dress yourself a burlap sack with arm and leg holes if you think that sounds better than slowly, warmly digesting various forms of beautiful art and warm beverages from the center of a queen-size bed.

These people, man!

And now Dante has informed me that maybe, just maybe, I’m getting a little too worked up, here. This is a side-effect of friendless loneliness, he says. He’s rummaging through the garbage as I say this, and I’m the one with the problem! The little guy isn’t even trying to eat garbage, God help him, he just likes the sound paper bags make when you fold them with your hands. (I reuse paper grocery bags to line my trashcans.) And Dante, well — he’s got little hands. That’s a lot of folding he could potentially do, and you don’t have to tell him that. Together with his brother Virgil, they’ve been opening and closing the door to my living quarters for the last two weeks. I keep it shut to trap the heat in — it’s been snowing, don’t you know — but they just won’t have it!

I’m the one with the problem. Tsch!

Applebees. Tsch!

Here’s a nice thing that happened recently, and didn’t involve either the weather or people whom I don’t like: a dear friend came up to visit me. Oh, joy!

We played Demon’s Souls for a whole day and a half, I tell you. It had been hell to find that game. It was on clearance at some big store that carries everything and isn’t Wal-Mart, so I called and drove and finally tracked it down in a town called White Marsh, just north of Baltimore. Maryland is, by and large, a marshy place, I figure. I’m not sure what the titular “white” is denoting other than the dominate race of the slack-jawed yokels who live there. It was the only store in the whole damned state to even carry the game in the first place, let alone clearance it out! I wanted to have it in time for this dear friend, who ended up loving every second of our gloomy excursion together. I ended up driving up to White Marsh through Baltimore’s sludge-dripping ozone in order to avoid what would have been four dollars in tolls. It’s not exactly a “deal” when you have to pay for tolls, let me tell you.

So: Demon’s Souls acquired, I drove home and anxiously waited for this friend to show up. He ended up gifting me a succulent fruit that may have been a peach and a box of cookies, kindly donated on account of my birthday by his beehive-hair-having grandmother. She’s a lovely woman. I’ll . . . have to write her a thank-you note. I have a lot of these to fill out, actually — for the first time in a very, very long time, somehow, miraculously, generally everyone remembered that one time I was born, and that I still exist. How pleasant of them to recall little ol’ me!

For the love of Christ on the cross, Dante, either stay in my room or leave!

He has just come in the door huffing and puffing. He doesn’t have hips in the traditional sense (he’s a quadrupedal and all), though I imagine if he did, he’d have his little hands on them right about now. He’s flustered, I’m sure, because I’m writing instead of stroking his head and saying his two favorite words: “food” and “hungry”. He knows “hungry” because I always ask him, “Are you hungry?” just before feeding him whatever it is that he eats (God only knows, really). I am sorry, I have to said to him, I cannot feed you right now, as I’m writing something for no one to read!

Anyway: this friend of mine — this dear, dear friend (friends become quite dear when you have so few of them!), he enjoyed the hell out of Demon’s Souls. I would be doing you a disservice if I told you that I didn’t, too!

Really, we were giggling and passing the controller back and forth like little children. It was one of the best moments of 2010 — and I’ve already had my fair share of things to do in this new year we’ve living in right now. We were just so gum-sticky crazy to play that game. It felt marvelous.

I hope to see that rat bastard again soon, I do. We’ll continue our despondent story together. Until then, I think that I will continue to have overwrought correspondence with his brother. I am enjoying this relaying of ideas and language! With the one I have the slaying of ghost-knights and fire lizards, and with the other I have an information overload sitting in my inbox every other day! I’m a happy man, all things considered.

Maybe that last sentence was a joke.

And anyway, maybe it’s partially true if viewed in the context of these woefully infrequent sparks of human interaction. Maybe I do feel dandy when I’m slaying or talking with these brothers! And I say “infrequent” because the other colors of my existence are damp and shady. I’m going to do something about that real soon. My only solutions thus far have been 1) do push-ups until muscle failure, 2) gurgle too-delicious-to-be-real protein shakes (blended with four to five ice cubes, one banana (sometimes two) and a boastful amount of peanut butter), 3) read exciting literature post-muscle-pump and 4) hell, play Demon’s Souls. It just doesn’t feel right playing it alone, though. I get sort of frightened all by myself. There’s scary stuff in that game, okay!

I think I’ll go to sleep now. I end a lot of these things with some sort of indication that I no longer feel like being awake (see: alive), if only for a handful of hours. I’ll be alive again tomorrow, maybe. I say “maybe” because, hey, who knows! It could snow again and I might not realize it, and if it’s enough snow, maybe my roof with collapse and I’ll be buried in an icy tomb. That sounds like an all right way to go, if we may be honest with one another. The weather has been so restless lately that I would only be a little shocked and only a little frightened if it snowed so much that my modern home and it’s modern roof could not tolerate the weight of the snow resting on the ceiling of my bedroom in a would-be freak snowstorm.

Now I know what to pray for tonight!

Who knows if I’m even kidding about such things, nowadays.