What in the hell …

This is not what I want to use this space for.

As often as I’ve said please please please let me get what I want, this post will not be it.

Minneapolis is colder than Chicago. It’s more predictable, though, as there’s not as much wind. Regardless, better or worse, it’s so cold. I hate this time of year. I wish we could placate Demeter, maybe send a cake with a file to Abu Ghraib or wherever it is her daughter is sequestered so she’d stop punishing the rest of us. Like every winter, I find myself asking why I still live here. I really don’t know, except that I just happen to.

I like to think there’s a connection between this part of the US and a certain aesthetic in some of the cultural production here. A lot of bands and writers I like from around here have a roughly similar sensibility (winter in particular is a motif in many a song I like, in that Jawbreaker “it’s as good as it is sad” kind of way).

Essentially, it’s a sense of being trapped, as opposed to being lost. (”We can’t go on. We must go on.”) I like to categorize my friends by this same two point system as well. People who live places with good weather and economies that are not in a slow and steady decline, they are sometimes lost. They find themselves. They don’t know what they want.
Here, we are trapped. We know what we want. We don’t, and probably can’t, have it. (Sun. Warmth. More money. More time.)

It’s all very reductive of me I know, which makes it simple enough to remember for use during drunken mutual lamentations with friends, and speculation as to which side different people fall on. There’s something I like about that sensibility, it’s part of what I like about it here. It’s partly an occasional “we’re all in it together” mentality (at a minimum, it’s easy to make small talk with strangers waiting for the bus) and a sense of “I’m here anyway”, making the best of it kind of thing, a sort of “there’s no escape so we’ll love our confinement” rally wherein the residents of No Exit decide other people aren’t really so bad after all, coupled with a grumbling pretending not to be spoiled like other people with their good weather that we don’t really want anyway… At least the snow’s kinda pretty sometimes.