Author's Note: Even now, as I post this, Naked City Atlanta is going on. The word this month is Obsession. Even though I can't be there, I'm writing this post to appear as if I were there in spirit.
There it was, the pounding of the kazoos, throbbing in my brain; an obsession that I could not get rid of. Some people who look at the polar vortex gain a deep insight into the weather of the world; and some go mad. Some just start running and never stop. I'm one of the ones that went berserk.
It started small, you must understand. The weather department at a news station is small, usually consisting of one or two people. KQWAK was a bit larger than most, given the major metropolitan area that was Bismark North Dakota, so we had four. Alright, perhaps it wasn't the size of our city so much as the fact that we had weather that was chaotic...and the weather girls were all rather attractive. Except myself. I am neither a girl nor am I attractive.
But I was here first.
I stared at the vortex as it swirled and swirled on my little screen, phantomly imposed on the green-screen as I stared at it, pointing it out with my laser pen. I was talking about the polar bears in the air as I stood in front of a stupid screen. I was naked, baring my soul to these people. And they didn't think it was real...the monstrous ursine cacophony soaring up above the stratosphere, ready to turn us all into so much lunch chow.
I'm not supposed to care about this. A polar vortex is just a weather term for air that decides to go south for the winter in a place it never should be, but I know the polar bears are angry. I said, I said to the guy I bought my car from, I said, "I want something that looks great and gets really shitty gas millage! Fuck the environment!" And I did, because you wouldn't believe what you can earn standing in front of a green screen and pretending you know what the hell you're talking about. Fine, so I paid that little pimple for the answers to every test, but have you seen the other women in the news room?
I mean seriously.
And weather groupies? I mean, there is nothing like getting serviced with a girl just in college who goes all gushy like a fruitloop with the magical words,"Castroverius Cumulonimbus Cirrico." Seriously. Clouds. Tell them you're on TV and mention a few cloud names to them and they're all over you.
So I'm driving in my new car, hot blond on the carpet content as can be, humming with the hummer, and I shit you not, there is this coca cola billboard, and this polar bear, this polar bear is staring at me, as if I have personally
The bears, their claws,
The bears, their maws
The whirling vortex of infinite doom
I spot beneath myself a white wasteland
Where none, but the most incompetent
Let the people run free
Frozen in their tracks
Frozen in their cars
Frozen in all of the ways that matter
And I know,
I know in my heart
That I have been eaten by the bears
And they have stolen my soul.
What does it mean? What does it all mean?
Not a god damn thing except that I need to finish my coffee and that I need to get somewhere considerably warmer. I wonder what the pay is for weather men in Miami....
