Latte Mode

Well it’s been a quiet month in Lake Wobegon, my home town…out there on the edge of the great lakes. It’s been cold, very cold, and snowy, very snowy…and I’ve been taking refuge in the bath tub late at night. I have a tiny wireless speaker that I use to stream old episodes of A Prairie Home Companion, and I float there in the over sized jacuzzi tub; in the candlelit dark of the wee hours of the desolate winter morning; listening to Garrison’s soothing voice– his new, yet familiar, small town tales– and all the subtle ruminations on the unseen and implied ties that bind humanity.

Sometimes I’m not in the mood to listen to someone talk, though, and I’ll go for the radio in the corner instead…fishing about in the AM bandwidth for something exotic and extraordinary. The best I’ve found so far was a french station, very faint, probably out of Canada. Talking, lots of talking…but sometimes music, very interesting music. I got the old tube radio at a resale shop, about the size of a breadbox. Decorative, as they were, and wooden…this antique from the 50s was carved into the shape of a hanging lantern, and has a little door on the front that you open to get access to the dials. It’s mostly in working order, though a few of the potentiometers will need to be cleaned and/or replaced…a project for a warmer time. For now, they’ll do. I wonder where this recent love of fixing physical things came from? It’s like I exhausted and or completed the realm of thoughts and ideas and moved on to the more tangible things…but in a similarly reckless and curious style. The room mate has taken to calling me ‘the mad scientist’ on a regular basis, most often in describing me to others….which, naturally, I take as a compliment. Makes me feel a little like Dr. Emmet Brown, my fictional hero.

Next on my list of hack-job repairs is the drivers side window in my car. A week ago, I had tried rolling it down after it had sat outdoors in freezing rain for a while, and as it strained to break free of the ice, I heard something inside of it snap. The window rolled down just fine, but UP was no longer something it was capable of. I drove all the way home in sub-freezing weather with my window rolled almost all the way down like a total jackass. With a little help I was able to coax it back up to the closed position, but the door is going to need to come apart…and tinkering is going to need to ensue, but like the radio, I’m waiting for it to get above freezing again. These old fingers don’t last long against the biting cold.

It’s been an odd month for weather, in the worst possible way. The hard winter that my intuition told me was coming came in early January, and has yet to abate. Cabin fever has set in quite strongly, and has affected not just my mood, but the mood of just about everyone I know. Driving is a nightmare, the likes of which I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced…which is doubly compacted by the fact that I now live on top of an enormous, mile-high hill. Not even what my brother and I call ‘latte mode’ driving is good enough to deal with the kind of ice and snow onslaught we’ve most recently been dealt. Typically, when the season begins, reacclimatising one’s self to winter driving is a bit difficult…initially filed with a lot of white-knuckled paranoia, and obsessively careful speeds. By the end of the season, however, we grow so accustomed to the physics-defying nature of driving on ice, that one can accomplish it without even thinking; calmly sipping a latte and talking on a cell phone, while spinning 360s in the middle of a busy highway– hence the term; ‘latte driving.’

First, we were hit with a week long blizzard. Temperature dipped well below freezing, and the drifts of snow piled up. Then, for a day, the temperature rose well above freezing; offering a small respite from the brutal cold, and filling the air with a low thick mist from all the evaporating snow. This mist brought everyone back to life in a profound way, if only for a little while. I sent and recieved many nostalgic messages from people who had, until that day, been forgotten. Funny what a little warmth and humidity can do to the memory…but, as such things go, it was not to last, and the deep freeze returned the very next day– solidifying the layer of water that had collected underneath everything into a layer of thick glare ice. On this ice, more and more snow was dumped, generating a concoction for the worst possible driving conditions imaginable.

Not that I’m complaining. Truth be told, few things make me feel more alive than winter driving…which, I’m sorry to say is just a sad little fact. Yet another reflection on all of the unseen and undocumented consequences of american over-liberalization. Why, if I didn’t have winter driving every year to help keep me connected to feeling alive, I might have to do something crazy-drastic instead– like shoot up a school, perhaps…