How I Write When It's 20 Degrees Outside

Anton Chekhov wrote that the weather is a chastisement from God. You have to wonder just what the fuck Chicago did wrong. Lest we forget the the city's windy not for its you-most-certainly-are-in-KS-strength blustering, but rather for its politicians, that wind metaphorizing its way into the literal and vice versa, the Word and Wrath of God blowing trans-Loop, gerrymandered transit lines and chapped faces frozen alike, the circumstances of production and object themselves spooning away in some frozen chrysalis. Sin and chastisement all, I'd crucify the tablet smashers myself, if only I didn't have to make the 40 minute (rather than year) wander down to city hall. We idolators take the brunt anyways, but it's just not commensurate punishment.

But some other writer said not to ever, ever start with a description of the weather. But also you have to wonder if it can be called weather (that is, if that thing that is outside is the same out there as it is in here) seeping through, as it does, all those bodily thresholds. We're all holes anyways, from orifice to blackhead divits to the asymptotal proximity of electron and nucleus - H20, air, and tiny sparks of electricity, flimsy enough, it would seem, to drift like so much ashy detritus from the burning cherry-tips of fat-cat-chomper thunderheads, dragging until their substance flecks away to us below, and we slip on it and fall on our asses in the middle of a crosswalk. We blow away little by little, suck up our substance by smaller degrees, until dissipation overtakes reification. So the weather wraps your liver up in cold (and let's not forget that cold is a whole lot of nothing-at-all), and you think about that time Jon Anderson offered to rearrange your liver to the solid mental grace. I said thanks but no thanks, and yet he insisted. Jon Anderson, you're not fooling anyone - you don't know how to play tambourine. Now you see me coming from stage-right, about to rage on you! Look scared!