The cold is here. Or moving in. Seeping. I’ve been waiting for it. Anticipating it. And now, today, I am legitimately cold. My right hand is shriveling into a claw and yet I am resisting turning up the heat because I don’t want to use more oil than necessary so that those motherfuckers can’t hold our use of oil against us and drill in the arctic.

If it were not dark by three year round in the holler I live in, I would have solar panels. For sure.

Am not looking forward to snow.

But then when it gets cold like this and snow is on the mind you can do something gorgeous and self-indulgent (because you know how it will make you feel) like pour a glass of red wine and read The Dead (the best short story ever) and wait in anticipation of the last paragraph when your heart gets ripped out of your chest:

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.