The winter of my discontent

go away, polar vortex

The hell is this cold white stuff coming down from the sky? asks Oliver. Same, buddy. Same.

That icy bastard winter has arrived with a vengeance, as though it overheard the unpleasant things I have said about it in these letters and vowed retribution. First it slammed me with a miserable winter cold that had me out of commission for a good two weeks and a bit. Just as I was getting back on my feet, a hard freeze stormed in. Now I know people in places where they get eight feet of snow regularly and think that any temperature above freezing is shorts weather will find this hilarious but I am a delicate hothouse flower and here in the American Deep South, we simply do not have the infrastructure to cope with days in a row of temperatures that never rise above freezing on top of snow and ice. Our pipes burst. Our vehicles go all over the damn road because why would we have snow tires and no, we wouldn’t know what the hell to do with them if we did because we have no idea how to drive in even a quarter-inch of snow let alone ice. We suffer, and we pine for the scorching days and nights of summer, sweaty and oppressive and alive with the whir of crickets and the murmurings of tree frogs and the cry of the whippoorwills. Give me 100F over 20F any day.

Somewhere out there, I guess, is a version of winter that I could love. It requires a working fireplace, something I currently don’t have for reasons too boring to get into. Coming in from the cold to a cozy pub in London or somewhere on the English coast and sitting next to the fire with a pint? Or sitting beside a roaring fire at home with a good book and a hot drink? Also, sweaters are nice. And warm beds with lots of blankets in a cold room. That’s the kind of wintering I can get behind. But—let’s be honest—even then, only in the shape of a brief affair. Like, two weeks, and then it’s like, oh my god, block winter on all the socials and why did I give winter my number and pretending not to know winter when we awkwardly attend the same social engagement. You’re okay in small doses, baby. Small doses.

Anyway, today it will warm up enough that I can turn the water back on without fear that the pipes will burst and fingers crossed I’ve been conservative enough with the heat that I’m not going to run out of propane before I can get another delivery next week and by the end of the weekend Storm Enzo will be on its way out (apparently we sent it over to Ireland and the UK in the form of Storm Eowyn? Soz, y’all, we can’t seem to help ourselves exporting all kinds of things that nobody asked for or wanted) and we will, thank goodness, be soaring into February on the kind of temperatures that people in Ireland would tell you are “roastin’” and that I would call the bare minimum of acceptably warm—and frankly quite lovely for this time of year. Running water and warmer weather sounds impossibly glorious to me, like dancing-around-like-I’m-in-a-musical good, so perhaps it is sometimes true that, as they say, a change is as good as a rest.

“I belong in an apartment in a city with a metro stop down the street” I whiningly texted various people this past week or some variation thereof, dressed in forty-seven layers of clothing, hoping the power did not fail, and and feeling very how did I get here, thank you, Talking Heads, as I looked around at my not-exactly-a-shotgun-shack-but-not-the-farthest-from-it . I feel a little bit like two irreconcilable halves, or maybe as many as six or eight of them. I feel like I’m always falling further behind. I feel like Persephone in the underworld. I feel like sitting down with a paper and pen and asking myself What would David Lynch do and then I feel like swimming down deep in my unconscious mind and bringing back stories that are so weird nobody will buy them, nobody will read them, nobody will be able to read them or maybe I just won’t let anybody try. I feel like spring cleaning. I feel like teaching myself to draw. I feel like writing stories people actually will want to read. I (still) feel like 2025 is going to be an extraordinary year for me despite its inauspicious offerings thus far of illness and ice because I might as well, because I can’t not, because who will bother to believe it if not me.

This brief “oral history of Twin Peaks” published in The Guardian is just glorious from start to finish:

Horse: When they did the premiere of The Return, the executives had not seen it, and they said: “Mr Lynch, would you say a few words?” And he comes out; he goes: “This project has a lot of wood in it. I like wood.”

Like my writing? Want more? Buy my books! I’ve written three collections of weird and ghostly short fiction: The Moon Will Look Strange, You’ll Know When You Get There, and Now It’s Dark. You should be able to buy them online or special order them from your favorite local bookstore. The links lead to my publisher’s page, where the second and third can also be ordered directly. Not sure you’ll like my fiction? Go here for a list of places where you can read and listen to it online for free. Here’s a more complete bibliography.