I heard someone say it was going to be a hard winter the other day. I’m not sure what that means. I assume they mean cold. I know it’s just semantics, but that’s not what I would consider hard. There was a band several years back called When People Were Shorter And Lived Near The River. Sounds like a quote from an Anthropology text. I liked the name better than the band. That’s what I’m built for; the north, the harsh winter. Even here the winter was too warm; I hear it was more wintry than the three years prior.
I remember being about sixteen and I was out in a birch forest somewhere not too far from here. The snow was deep and virgin and the bare branches of the birch trees were mostly white and the snow was falling and I was blowing blue/white smoke from a cigarette. Except for the knot holes in the birch, a few abandoned birds’ nests and the bluish color of my smoke everything was white and silent. I remember I wasn’t cold; I had taken my gloves off to smoke and forgotten to put them back on. The flat landscape had small hillocks where wind had made drifts and I sang Die Lorelei out loud to myself and laughed, thinking of poor Hansel and his sister lost in the woods. I only know Die Lorelei and Deutschland Uberalles. The latter seemed wrong and, anyhow, ever since I heard the fucking Dead Kennedys California Uberalles I can’t remember the tune to Deutschland Uberalles.
Somewhere within a year of that I had climbed to the top of the coal pile next to the old MAC tower on campus during a blizzard. It was the highest point I could get too outside and at night. My footprints were black but everything else was the sort of yellowish color of nighttime where lights reflect off of snow.
I’m sure there were other things I missed about this area the first few years after I had left for good. I only remember the winters. As a kid I would play all day in the unbearable humidity that is warm weather here, of course I’d play in the snow too. As I got older the summer grew harder to take. I might have moved to anchorage if I had thought about it, maybe I did, I thought I was getting married forever and she had a say in where we went. It’s easy to predict the past; I mean it’s easy to say my kids were destined to be Oregonians. There’s a lot of ephemeral things I’m unclear on, things that are opaque, destiny isn’t really one of them. I don’t think the ability to predict well has anything to do with destiny either, there are a lot of things easy to predict. I don’t have an alternate theory either, I just don’t think anything has to happen, some things are bound to, but they don’t have to. Even if I thought otherwise I still would be disturbed that there is a past tense for destiny. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel full of air.
There’s a lot of weird shit that happens that I don’t understand that would make even less sense if it were destined. I think of it more along the lines of the old saw about all those monkeys with typewriters and an infinite amount of time eventually writing the collected works of Shakespeare. I just mean the longer things are around the better the odds are weird shit’ll happen. It’s like the thing about the chances of getting hit by lightning versus the chances of winning the lottery; lightning hits down pretty damn regularly, the lottery has only be running since --- well, in the grand scheme of things since there have been humans with spare leisure time and some form of economy; I’d like to think cavemen didn’t take odds on Ogg getting et by a tiger.
The key part of the lightening/lottery thing is the you and whereas you could skew the odds in favor of getting hit by lightning, skewing them in favor of winning the lottery would cost more than you’d win and if you could afford it why would you? The odds, however, on my kids being born anywhere but Oregon --- that ships sailed 31 years ago. Not to pretend I’m rationale or anything, but if you’re in favor of destiny, I’ll give you ten to one odds for that bet. Just saying, there shouldn’t be a past tense for destiny.
Oh, oh, oh, I can’t remember her name, but she used to be on ads on late night TV. A black lady with a bad fake Jamaica accent, a psychic, and the testimonials were all people amazed that she could tell them things that already happened to them. Let me not be cynical for a minute and concede that she had some supernatural power that gave her psychic abilities and made her Jamaican accent slip into Washington DC accent every seventh word or so. That’s the worst supernatural ability ever, to be able to predict the past especially to someone who was there. Even suspending my disbelief and having her tell me about a car accident I was in twenty years ago (suspending the disbelief that starts rattling off all the public records) I’d merely be whelmed (neither under nor over). I know I was in a car accident twenty years ago; I was the guy picking glass out of my forehead. For that matter predicting I’ll be in another one isn’t really all that spooky either. Telling me the plates of the asshole who took off twenty years ago, now that’d be useful.
Oh. Shit. I was going somewhere wasn’t I? Maybe not. I look forward to winter. I look forward to Autumn. I think if I believed in destiny and I knew what it was I probably wouldn’t be looking forward so much. I have more winters behind me than I have in front of me. If that’s not an absolute fact I’m going to go buy a lottery ticket and stand in a field with a flag pole during the next thunderstorm; I can’t lose.
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