Snowpocalypse Now II: The Blitz

A specter is haunting Washington, DC. The giant snow is at our Friday doorstep. Is it not enough to have suffered the big one in December, called "Snowpocalypse"? Yes, I have lived with the creeping guilt of hearing from the distant warmth of Copenhagen the tragic accounts of that temporarily inconvenient struggle against a wrathful god. Now in DC, we have endured a couple of fiv'-inchers during the past quarter moon, but nothing in our weary souls has truly prepared us for Snowpocalypse II (represented graphically here). We're anticipating over a foot of snow tomorrow and Saturday, possibly two feet. I try to calm my trembling hand as pen touches paper haltingly in full knowledge that such circumstances condemn both extended soul and inert paper to dust in the wind,... all we are is dust in the wind.

Sex scandals, China, and snow bring this proud, unmentionably segregated town to its knees. Schools close to save starving children, universities synchronize sick days with capricious nature, government urgently provisions unpaid leave. Bus drivers become a multitude of Mr. Scotts giving it all they have til they can nae give it no more, Captain, to propel their steely crafts up 5-degree slopes. Our organic grocery store was cleaned out tonight by the huddling upper middle class masses. No fruit or vegetables left on the shelves except for a few moldy onions and mushy bananas alone and forgotten like Charlie Brown's Christmas tree. Long lines at checkout of jostling, frightened customers - "no,... excuse you." Desperately hungry and thirsty, and concerned about supporting plastic packaging, Mrs. H and I scavenged what we could: two cans of pickled jalapenos, a jar of Nutella, roasted red pepper hummus, whole wheat penne rigate, 1lb 8oz of my favorite French roast, a medium-body, moderately tannic Malbec, and a six of Prohibition Ale from San Francisco. Mentally calculating our most basic needs, I also purchased 4 pounds of nails, 10 shanty boards, a mantle tree iron, and two casks of lime. We felt blessed that our under-fifteen items qualified us for the Express lane.

I've seen this before. In Paris, in the early 1990s, when the US bombed Serbia, citizens in some quarters ran to the stores to buy the remaining stocks of rice and flour, butter and endives. I've seen it as a child in Vietnam in 1975, too, in a Dark Side of the Moon, sheepskin rug kind of way. But this is different, transcendent, a splendorous sublimity of catastrophe.

I will try to blog until the last drop of blood has been drained from my Netflixing, Malbec sipping, idly net-surfing, crêpe-mangeur body.

Pray for us. Pray for us as we crouch at the center of the political universe, pleading with our Double Chin leaders to lead us from our plight. God help us all.

And, don't forget, God Bless America! We shall survive, procreate, consume!