This ain't Kansas, honey--this is Illi-noize!

The Hazy Shades of Winter

2003-01-28 - 7:41 p.m.

WELCOME TO TORNADO ALI

TODAY'S LESSON: I HATE WINTER*, VOLUME ONE

*see also �I hate summer,� and �I hate spring,� to appear in the future.

Yesterday morning when I arrived at work, all bundled up in my ridiculously puffy rapper coat, my pulled-tight hood smashing the hair I�d just worked so diligently to coif, I stepped out of my car, slipped in the snow, and smashed my Martha Stewart Everyday coffee cup into three pointy pieces, upon which I could�ve impaled a vampire. How very orderly, how very Martha, that it should break in even lines.

Then when I walked to yoga class, the bottoms of my bell-bottomy yoga pants got all soggy. And then I had to keep stepping in the gray puddles of slushy, shitty snow that melted off my shoes. Which is no way to do the Warrior, let me tell you.

And although it is the ass-end of January, my neighbors still have not taken down their elaborate, multicolored, bright-as-blazes Xmas lights-- in fact, they're still plugging them in every night.

I keep wondering what these people are thinking as they flick the switch night after night.

Was their Christmas so uneventful they forgot it already happened?

Are they making some kind of fundamentalist, pro-Christmas political statement?

Or are they using all their decorations as a substitute for a security light? I mean, walk through their yard and you�re gonna get SEEN.

Most disturbing are the actual yard ornaments, which include lighted reindeer whose necks are surely in need of chiropractic care from all these months of lowering and raising, lowering and raising. They�re like those freaky mall elves whose entire lives are spent frozen in place except for one arm swinging up and down.

What un-examined lives those ornaments lead.

I once heard that Freud believed procrastination was nothing but repressed anger and resentment, that people put things off because they are angry they had to do them in the first place. Which makes a whole lot of sense.

But if my neighbors are really pissed off at their reindeer, why did they put them up in the first place? Hmmm?

Not that they don�t have every right to leave up their garish bulbs, but still. Shivering people in the trailer park down the road could use some of that electricity.

Aww, aren�t I just a lil� ol� Robin Hood.

ONE FOR THE ROAD

Tornado Ali is ALL of these.

Which ones are you?

that was then - this is now