So, what have we done to deserve this miserable dreck outside?  I mean, could God just FOAD with the snow and ice already?  Last night I watched the compressed replay of the Jays’ afternoon game in Detroit and you could see the player’s breath, the umpires and coaches were wearing mittens and toques for Chrissakes.

Are we trapped in some kind of Ingmar Bergman movie here?  Like maybe “The Seventh Snow”, “Frozen Wild Strawberries” or “The Virgin Ice-Spring”?  I feel like getting up a game of chess out on the street with a homeless guy wearing a cowl and holding a shovel, just for the comic relief.

It’s enough to make you write bad poetry, as in:

Ice, falling from the sky onto my head

Nice, but only if we were dead

Lice, would be better than this dread, of

Rice, tossed at a wedding held instead

Of in a church, in an Arctic snow-bed.

                                               ****

Or maybe I could listen to some Jan Garbarek records just to cheer myself up, but fortunately I don’t have any.

(For those lucky enough to be unfamiliar with Garbarek, he’s a tenor and soprano saxophonist from that fun-filled place called Norway.  He’s known for his extremely stark, razor’s-edge, plaintive tone and relentlessly bleak and suicidal musical outlook.  He’s kind of the Bergman of the saxophone and he would probably love this weather, the arsehole.  His music has been described as “fiordic jazz” and is about as much fun as a Viking invasion, makes the Ice Age look like “Beach Blanket Bingo”, with apologies to the recently departed Mouseketeer.  Jan makes Nietzsche read like Jerry Lewis, Wagner sound like The Archies.) 

We musicians refer to him as Jan Garbage-truck – there, finally, a laugh.

I’m going to run along now and dig out as many Louis Armstrong records as I can and warm myself in the sunshine of his sound.

© 2013, Steve Wallace. All rights reserved.