It’s christmas, more or less. Maybe you’ve noticed? A regular tip-off are the cloying illustrations on everything up to and including toilet paper ads of snowy landscapes. You know the drill, don’t pretend you don’t. Drifts of it, snowflakes, Victorian ice skaters, reindeer; an entire iconography of images that mean nothing to boy a like me, sensitive and attractive, but completely unexposed to the phenomenon of snow due to my Gulf Coast childhood and subsequent life in California. And let me be clear about this, I am not unhappy about missing out on it. Whenever I have been forced to deal with snow, on visits to Colorado or Tahoe, it has always confirmed my suspicion that it’s vastly over-rated, like rain that won’t take a hint and leave.
Still, the holy season of jeebus’s birth and Macy’s last chance at making their quarterly numbers rolls around and suddenly the white stuff is everywhere. These ads and commercials are baffling to those of us lucky enough to live on the West Coast or along the magic of Interstate 10, snow-free, all of it. We see those pictures (“Look! Polar bears drinking coke! Oh boy!”) and think “what the fuck is going on here? Where are the palm trees?” Is it just me who thinks a whole ad industry is devoted to making us feel deprived by being left out of something we don’t even want?
People here will occasionally say how very much they miss snow. One assumes they were dropped on their heads at some point, possibly in the snow, but I’m too polite to ask.
And now word comes from Night is Half Gone of snow in New Orleans. New Orleans! I have been so betrayed.
mrpeenee 