WHINING ABOUT THE WEATHER

Yesterday evening it was 40°F, with a biting breeze. It had proven too cold to continue smoking my pipe outdoors, despite wearing my thick Canadian overcoat. This was worse than Monday. Naturally I am blaming the government. A man can only take so much. What's the point of having a stash of delicious tobacco and a lovely pipe when it's so abysmally frigid that you cannot enjoy it?

Lunch, on the other hand, had been excellent. Bittermelon beef over rice with sploodges of hot sauce. The place was nearly empty, seeing as getting there would have meant mounting an expedition with naked bearers trekking through the Arctic wilderness, and many Cantonese are, when it's a frozen wasteland outside, hesitant to wander away from the burning sled dog corpses keeping them warm in their tents. Or something like that. Even the white yuppies, who normally flock to the streetside parklets on Polk Street, were getting plotzed inside shoulder to shoulder with strangers whose pandemic history they did not know.

Yeah, I know that on the East Coast you all are used to bitter cold; it's your native environment or something. You thrive when you can take pictures of your car in your driveway looking like a giant cotton ball and send them to your friends. See? We've got weather here!
Unlike you wussies in Australia, bally kangaroos!

Then you mob the stores and panic-buy all the white bread and toilet paper.
Because if the snow lasts, you still have plans.
The crapper is part of that.

Those last two blocks homeward I passed piles of naked cadavers; joggers and people who were walking their dogs when the cold felled them. They were probably glad that West Nile Fever, Zika, Dengue, or Malaria would not be a worry for several months.


Or earthquakes and wild fires.


FORTY DAMNED DEGREES!



I need to blame someone for this.
It's probably those Nazi truckers heading to Washington.
We need pyres of MAGA flags in the streets for warmth, and to keep the schools open.

Seriously wondering what I'm doing for lunch today.
I don't want to go outside at all.
Bloody Republicans!

Hot sauce. Milk tea. A pipe.
Dammit.

Just bellyaching about the weather, child. It's what we Dutchmen do. We're old and we know things. Plus we're crotchetty, and we need dead bodies to burn.
Must hoard white bread and toilet paper.



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