Day 13: Arctic conundrum and the fine art of filching coffee….

Day 13: Arctic conundrum is it being so cold outside you are not sure if the row of penguin classics doting the classical shelves of your apartment (think Diderot’s Nun and Ibsen’s Peer Gynt)  are not timeless tithes of literature but in fact actual penguins loafing around in (don’t say tuxedo-clad) a tuxedo-clad waddle inside the brisk igloo of your apartment, words exiting your lips in crisp ice packs, bubbled caricatures of dialogue in a Jack Frost comic strip. It is January and it is not only cold but it is frigid. Glacial. The dash indicative of negative temperatures saluting an indentation of  frost-coated digits, toppling backwards, falling from the abysmal shiver of the teens, and beyond.

It’s been cold  here in P-town, brother.

It’s been cold.

The morning of January sixth, my half birthday, I marched the approximate mile and half from work to my apartment bundled up, looking like sumo wrestler in my layers of thermal armor.  The wind chill reported being something like negative forty. As in below. As in it felt like I was stranded  in the first, still to this day, inexplicable scene from Empire Strikes Back where Luke is attacked by your friendly neighborhood Wampa and slivers into the  scatological innards of his domesticated Tauntaun to keep warm. I was fine with the exception that when I arrived home there were icicles in my beard, a stalactite of chimes coating the three week gruff on my chin, which is saying a lot because I was wearing a face mask.

Brother it’s been cold.

 

It's so cold even inside it feels like I'm using a Klondike bar for an athletic cup and just got punched in the nads by a vociferous polar bear.

Brother it's been cold.

 While walking home through the plowed  banks that morning the problem was that (honestly) I thought my contact lenses might freeze and (if you are playing the SUCCULENT SOBRIETY drinking game where you take a swig of an alcoholic beverage of choice at the outset of a run-on sentence, familial phrase, pesky paragraphs, a Philologist-pandering  ACT word you have never heard before or might not even exist, here’s a familial phrase to wet your whistle) since Birth of Christ  is birth of bankruptcy I’m about 100 days overdue for getting a new pair contacts.  En route home I could almost feel my eyes blister and snap in a flurry if precipitated static.      


It's been cold.

 

  Still sore as shit from yesterday’s workout. It feels like every muscular fiber in my anatomy is grafted by glass shards and chipped clods of shale, which makes me feel like a walrus or an ice-cube anvil just plopped out, tumbled, and flattened me from out of nowhere.

 

Nowhere being a Zumba class in Antarctica.

My body is sore and it is cold and (shit) I have not had a beer/cup-o-coffee/slab-o-meat or tobacco product in thirteen days. I'm still not sleeping. After hammering thoughts into the keyboard this morning for a couple hours I put on a classic movie (Rebecca, Hitchcock) draping myself with whatever blanket I could find, retiring to my chamber  with a heap of books. Nothing like reading selected passages from Huxley's EYELESS IN GAZA or Forster's Howard's End. I'm re-reading Martin Eden by Jack London ( I know, what a bildungsroman, but still) and Kosinki's early stuff. Also Eco. My favorite book to read this time of year is a book called WINTER by RICK BASS but (alas) I gave it to someone who no longer talks to me.

I'm thankful that, in times of frigid temperatures, there are books. Beautiful trussed volumes of ink splatted on unassuming sheaths of cellulose pulp. I read pretty much the way I fuck. I'm a 'promiscuous reader' (as the great George Chambers would say). I gnaw at the page. I tug at the bra strap of every sentence. I annotate in flagellating scratches of ink. I go for hours, not wanting to stop, wanting to optically fornicate with the bilge of every paragraph I accost. Books are bondage. I beg for more. I disappear for a couple of years leaving the sheets of the stained text listless, pages tittering, syntax stirring, until, on a whim, I grope the text off the wooden lip of the shelf spread her pages open like legs digesting more in ravenous blinking thrusts and fits of gluts.

 

 

 

It was around zero degrees yesterday as I skidded into the elements, walking down Moss Avenue, choking on vatic huffs of frosty air, dipping into the polar slope of the South Side. About a year ago I voluntarily cut-up my ATM card (since the nearest ATM is the bar across the street from where I live) so now, when I need funds, I trek unencumbered Admiral Peary style about a mile and a half down the hill to the nearest CEFCU.  Normally I get a cheap watered down cappuccino but realized when I got there that I was on day 13, 27 more days to go until  I can indulge in the best-selling liquid on this planet once again. 

During my tortuous years as a tattered impecunious Bohemian when I spent 13 hours a day in the computer lad writing books, there were times when I was homeless and lived in my station wagon and there were times when I ate (not often) out of trashcans but I always had coffee.

 

Always.

 

In blue teen-angst ridden labyrinths of  high school I snuck into the teacher's lounge and helped myself to a Styrofoam cup, gratis. I then got admonished by wizened faculty members. I then spouted off, informing them that here I was trying to ( Don't use the word ameliorate. I used the word ameliorate)  ameliorate my education at a school where the cumulative ACT score of 14 and there they are getting pissy about coffee. When I attended Bradley I knew exactly the right time to skulk up the gothic steps of Bradley Hall, to the fourth floor unbidden view of campus which at the time was the English faculty lounge, which, I felt it my duty to help myself to a cup on the Alma Mater.

 

 

For a long time I got free coffee from One World because back in the day all you had to do was stumble downstairs after getting high with the employees and help yourself, even though half the time it tasted like the house blend was brewed with bong water. When Starbucks (finally) arrived in campus town circa 2006 I got free coffee there for a long time, but I think they just liked the idea of having a writer in residence who was always buzzed.

 

My low point truckling came when, after paying my respects to a dear friend who had fortuitously died way too young, I stopped in the nourishment center in the morgue, opened the door beneath the standard morgue BUNN coffee pots and purloined a half tub of Folgers' (for my friend's memory, It's what he would've wanted I told myself). I also attended a few AA meetings just to drown myself in caffeinated bliss before going back home and writing til dawn.

 

I sometimes never had food.

 

But I always had coffee.    

 

With the exception of the last 13 days.

 

With 27 more to go.

 

Baby, won't you come near. It's cold outside.