Solstice

There are no winters to discontent. I hate that sentiment. Winter is fabulous. More night in which to sleep. More night in which to drink and view each other by candlelight, which is flattering to just about nay complexion. More time for man-against-the-elements struggle, which in the city plays out as people huddled over hot-dog cart stoves. More time to catch swirling ice crystals on the tongue, and watch said crystals as they give form and function to the halos of street lamps. More time to dry clammy skin one indoors and thank good fortune for working furnaces, chugging along unseen below the floorboards. More time when snow melted by body heat only glasses makes the world a latticework kaleidoscope of hexagons, octagons, lines, stars, emanations, holes made by those sam street lights. When the world is dark people come together: they tell stories of relationships come and gone, or coming and going, if your prefer; they sing choral numbers to the glory of the Hammer of Thor, or, if you prefer, marinade the house in chugga-chugga Finnish doom metal. Winter gives more excuses to huddle, more excuses to beer-boggan, excuses to be in and a homebody and a friend and constant companion. Winter is not the time for Existentialist writers, simply because our pseudo-struggle to survive gives human existence an outside purpose--a common enemy, if you will. This is why I always concive of death as going back to some fetid, reeking, lukewarm (or warm) swamp in the tropics.

Winter is the time for decadent poems. It is the time of frozen fountains--perennial monuments to the most shallow human egotism. It is the time when your None becomes my All. It is the time to write long, drawn-out allegories that try to link Jazz, snakes, the water-towers on Manhattan's lower east side, snowdrifts, astronomy and the Olduvai gorge (I'm working on it; as you might imagine it's filled with unpublishably voluptuous phrases, appositions to make the reader's eye boggle, incantations to Lakshmi (from Huxley's Island, impromptu pomes, and my new favourite form of literary expression: the villanelle). It is also time for introverted guitar fingerpicking as well as blasting synthesized grandiosity of musical physics and oscillators for eternity.

Consider: ""Lycurgus, Numa, Moses, Jesus Christ, Mohammed, all these great rogues, all these great thought-tyrants, knew how to associate the divinities they fabricated with their own boundless ambition."