FREEZEMAGEDDON

There have been a whole lot of “MAGEDDONS” this year. The obvious “Coronageddon” as well as “Hurricanegeddon” and the attached “boredomgeddon” associated with each. If you’re wondering how to tell them apart, this one’s the coldest with a close tie to the wettest as most of those hurricanes were duds this year. Make no mistake, if you wanted to draw parallels, 2020 is rolling straight into 2021 as this was about the time last year that things started looking dicey. 

Currently, I’m sitting in the dark, but not out of choice like my usual mornings. The power is out and the storms haven’t started. I’m left considering what’s  a worse condition, hot and humid or cold and humid. I’m still landing on hot and humid. The sticky mess of a post hurricane power outage offering no reprieve except for cold showers. 

All of the above is just background noise for why we are here. With some exceptions, I’ve made an effort to move away from the documentation of the day as an entry here. It feels easy and it doesn’t bring out the sentences I want. It’s like there’s a different word switch for the mundane. Or maybe it’s that I have to slough off the top layer of what’s on my mind to press a little deeper into the meat of things. This makes sense. Life is a distraction. To get deeper you have to press and push away the underbrush  to find the treasures that lie beneath. They’re there. They’re always there. 

Pressing really means searching.  To search means to question. To start talking in order to hopefully arrive somewhere different. Most times for me it means walking through the past. Through music. Through the mall. By the Spencer’s Gifts with the black light posters and the gags and the “dirty section” that seemed to have a typed “18 and up” sign that no one enforced or cared about. By the Orange Julius, a place I passed often but can only remember going to once, maybe twice. A brain freeze received from some frozen orange concoction. The world’s first smoothies I guess? Past Morrison’s cafeteria, looking into the long windows that faced into the mall, the people holding their melamine trays, a half stop sign shape and size filled with jiggling desserts of suspect  ingredients. The floors, some industrial specked marble stone that would survive a direct hit from a nuclear warhead, which we knew was coming, Peter Jennings told us so nightly. The different “ends of the mall” anchored by the familiarity of stores, of place. The colors of Benetton, United by $80 rugby shirts and sweaters. Eventually a food court, a retail peak and the same downward slide of every mall in America, a seeming impossibility in 1987, an fate of inevitability in 2021. 

Those are the things I find when I breathe in the cold house air this morning and press. I find the past and in it, the warmth of familiarity through nostalgia. I love the return to it and so I always come back. To mark a place in time with a song, an album, sometimes a smell. I love rereading and watching things shift from a recounting of the present, the top layer of the pool, to the recovery of the past, a dive into the deep end of the YMCA pool that was always 11 or 13 ft deep. Never 12 (home pools always 8).  When I was a kid there was a safety and quiet in that deep end, an ultimate aloneness, but hugging. The pressure of the water like a tight sweater. 

This morning as the FREEZEMAGEDDON rolls on. I dive in and think of that first brain freeze from the Orange Julius in Biloxi, Mississippi’s Edgewater Mall, and I smile, content with the warmth of the dog, in a ridiculous sweater and the memories of my youth, a dive away. 

#hugsandhi5s