Where Art Thou???
By Frederick J. Blahnik
And the hounds were released from Hell, and for four straight days they sought their vengeance against us three Blahniks clustered on our non-extravagant acreage located in Pleasant Valley Township, Minnesota. The satanic wind never stopped blowing out of the east with its signature bestial fury over that period of time—only changing direction occasionally, albeit mildly, and then only on some seeming mischievous whim–and the temperature hovered right around the Mendoza Line of freezing throughout its full and miserable duration. Those days sans power were the very best of times for my Blahnik family…….
No, no……what the hell am I saying here?! No, of course they weren’t!! So much for the Dickensian bullshit and all that other clichéd crap!!! They were in fact the very WORST of times and that is the way they shall forever be remembered in my aging memory, irrespective of the fact each of those vivid recollections will be required to pass through the cleansing, overly generous filter of elapsed time before being stored permanently, just as all past remembrances were asked (ordered) to do. Let’s be absolutely clear about one thing right out of the chute though: There is nothing remotely quaint and romantic about being stranded without electricity, illumination, and running water for any period of time exceeding five minutes, and never let any demented, hopelessly-in-love-with-the-past, twentieth century graybeard attempt to convince you otherwise!
And so he slipped outside his freezing house at 4:00 in the morning to take a much-needed piss, after which he walked down to the end of his driveway to survey the surrounding countryside while standing fully exposed to that demonic wind currently blasting with jet engine fury straight out of the west. And, lo and behold, there were now two farmsteads with lights on not far off to the west—farms that might have already had their electricity restored at dusk, but this of course could not have been reliably ascertained from a distance during the light of day. It was an encouraging sign, certainly, though one that couldn’t afford him too much satisfaction inasmuch as those house-dwellers were presently sleeping in warm beds that were situated in rooms that could be brightly illuminated with a casual flip of a switch—a couple of which were even invested with.…Gasp—hold onto your seats here and try not to exclaim too loudly, Readers!!!…running water!–while he was standing outside in the unforgiving wind seeking relief for his tortured bladder and shamelessly envying their cushy fate, even as a noisy, bantam-sized, overmatched generator with two extension cords snaking from its front side into the house huffed and puffed in the background just outside the back door to his patio and a stinky kerosene heater struggled gallantly against the harsh elements to infuse his house with a minimal measure of life-sustaining warmth.
And all the while she continues struggling to pack her few things for a life-changing odyssey out west—without the benefit of artificial light and artificial heat and artificial providence—this while recognizing the shameful artifice of Mother Nature in full concert with the overlords who command same for playing such an evil joke on her during a time of intense need. Her days remaining in Minnesota are numbered down to fewer than two hands of extended digits now, she has a promising job interview scheduled for next Friday just after the noon bewitching hour in the far western state of Oregon, there may be a major snowstorm lurking sinisterly in the towering Rocky Mountains which she must pass through enroute to her ultimate destination, and still this freak pseudo-blizzard assailing us in the middle of April prevents her from adequately preparing for her imminent departure. Curse this hellish weather already, and curse whoever or whatever came up with the sadistic idea of springing (Pun intended!) it on her at such an unorthodox time of year even as she desperately toils with last minute moving preparations.
And so I beseech of you, my dedicated readers: Why do we remain huddled inside this absurdly chilly house now shorn of electricity, not unlike those shivering sparrows seeking scraps of food from barren birdfeeders out on the back deck, praying for warmer weather and an immediate cessation of the heinous winds assaulting us Minnesotans from seemingly every direction that latitude and longitude tangents are plotted. This is, after all, mid-April that we have advanced into now, and the thought that we should be trapped inside a cold residence bereft of electricity for three days running is ludicrous even by Minnesota’s cruelly skewed standards. Yet we are—Yes, you bet we are, you pantywaist sissies likely clothed in cargo shorts and tank-tops who are reading this sob story from warm weather utopias where your only climatological concern might be a Category 3 hurricane every ten years!!!–and as I eye the putrid shit bucket resting on the floor in the corner of the room closest to the door, I reflect on the fact that we are not so much prisoners of time as we are prisoners of unseemly time—those minutes and hours and days spent wastefully surviving the elements that undyingly seem to be on the attack here in the upper midwestern United States, as opposed to collaborating with them in a joint symphony honoring the beauty and primacy of life on Earth.
I mourn the freakish April weather, but more than that—Yes, so much more than that!—I mourn the missed opportunities, the missed pleasures, and the useless time which such vile weather fully and enthusiastically endorses. That time shall never be given back to us to use as our hearts desire, and those opportunities for happiness have been vindictively aborted and tossed onto the past’s rapidly expanding trash heap before ever seeing the light of day. Shame!!!!! Shame on you for being so selfish and duplicitous, Mother Nature!!!!! We did nothing to “deserve” this bullying treatment that you so dispassionately dish out to unwary Earthlings who through no fault of their own happen to reside in the northern hemisphere!!!!!
The migratory songbirds freshly (actually not so freshly) up from the South? Gone—long gone—either through starvation or having sensibly fled these tundraesque environs once the scelerous wind began howling out of the east or just disappeared somewhere into the stygian firmament, never to be seen or heard from again this year. How do I know this? Because we southeastern Minnesotans sadly experienced another freak winter tempest (Yes, I know the calendar which is flipped open to the month of April does not jell with this unconventional yet obvious assertion, but it’s nonetheless undeniably true) just last year. And the robins, which had returned happy and cheerful a good month earlier and some of which had already hatched and were joyously raising broods of fledglings, were nearly completely wiped out for the year in the aftermath of that maleficent storm. Only one, or at most two, pairs of robins survived the bird holocaust to remain on our prime piece of bird paradise in the countryside equidistantly outlying the sister communities of Stewartville and Racine, which are perched on the busy north-south Highway 63 in the southeastern toe of Minnesota, for the remainder of last spring and summer. But now we are facing the exact same scenario this “spring” under freakishly similar conditions: An uber-punishing winter storm swoops down on Pleasant Valley Township out of a gorgeous mid-April milieu and ravages everything in its path, including the migratory songbird population. My God, only two days ago the ambient temperature around here was seventy degrees Fahrenheit, the sun was shining radiantly, and the birds were singing lustily from the treetops, and now…..and now…..…THIS?!?!?! Unbelievable, I know, yet I have been blessed (Cursed?) with two perfectly good eyes to incontrovertibly indicate otherwise. Only the noxious blackbirds seem capable of surviving a vicious, wind-driven onslaught such as the one at hand, and a landowner’s prayers are blatantly rebuffed in this instance inasmuch as those are the only birds in our natural aviary that I would love to see destroyed wholesale.
The two pet dogs, one old and grizzled and the other naturally foolish one ostensibly in his prime? They are as confused about the present situation as much as anyone or anything, especially the ancient, wizened pooch who has experienced fifteen previous winters and springs. He doesn’t know for sure what is going on precisely, but then how could he possibly? Virtually every other year winter ends and spring begins and there is no turning back this natural cycle and starting over from scratch. But this year—again not unlike last year—winter has returned with a vengeance in the middle of April, and neither of the dissimilar dogs knows what to make of it. Some instinctive mechanism deep inside them tells them something is not right about this weird dynamic, but reality trumps instinct every time and the outlandishly cold temperatures and the gusty, nefarious winds which never cease and the slushy snow beneath their feet feel as foreign to them in April as it would in July. The grayish-white curs don’t know what to make of this peculiar aberration in our southeastern Minnesota weather patterns, and if they—much more closely attuned to the natural world and all its idiosyncrasies than technically advanced humans—cannot make good sense of the sorry situation, then how can we two-legged naturephobes possibly succeed in doing so?
The wife? Mercurial. At times patient and arrantly understanding, at other times cranky and ranting irrationally and hysterically. She, like myself, doesn’t always appreciate the pulchritude and serenity of life in the country, and winter (Although April is most decidedly NOT a winter month, understand?!) is the season when she most frequently and vituperatively vents about the inequities of life spent on a remote gravel township road, residing on a homestead that serves as an elephantine magnet for every snowdrift that harbors even the scantest desire to colonize our tri-county area. And this most recent freak storm only eggs her on more and strengthens her resolve to someday move to a locale where the prevailing weather systems seem more like a friend and less like an enemy.
The trees? Ah, yes, those fuckin’, infernal mature soft maple trees that form a three-sided ring around our pastoral, two-acre oasis in the flat farmland of southeastern Minnesota. Those abominable things never cease to be a monstrous source of consternation for me, not least of which is when the wind blows aggressively from ANY direction and then these inherently wimpy scrub trees succumb almost immediately to the buffeting and shed their wares. Now multiply your average wind speed by a magnitude of ten and imbue this scenario with a bona fide, 3:00-in-the-morning thunderstorm when the atmospheric temperature was a precarious thirty degrees Fahrenheit, and that lethal combination of gusty winds wed to ice-laden branches rendered our entire yard a veritable slaughterhouse for the aforementioned soft maple trees; the grisly results were glaringly plain to the naked eye the next morning. Sticks and branches of all sizes littered our yard everywhere, and one’s first impression was that our rural property had been strafed with heavy artillery fire for three consecutive hours in the middle of the night, such was the extent of the tree damage. Well, the massive amount of natural debris lying on the frozen ground ain’t just gonna melt into the soil someday akin to the thin layer of wet snow which immediately ensued the killer thunderstorm, hence that means when this whole shit-story of a power outage calamity is over someone is gonna have to go out there in our yard and dispose of that ugly mess of sticks and branches. Within our Blahnik family hierarchy, that assignment usually falls on my broad shoulders. Awesome, I know!!! Lemme tell ya, there’s nothing I enjoy more than pacing back and forth endlessly on our now-newly-sized fifty acre lawn like a man-of-arms guarding the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, laboriously stooping over every three feet to pick up sticks of all ilk and sizes for eventual burning and depositing them in a dinky wagon I pull behind me. Yet this unbelievably tedious job must be done irrespective of my pissing and moaning and complaining, and when our ridiculous mid-April power outage is over that task will be sitting right near the top of my extensive to-do list. Fun, fun, fun!!! Damn right, so much fun I can’t even bear to think about it!!!!!
The dullards and retards and Trump ass-kissers who keep vociferously denying climate change and insisting that these radical, ever-more-frequent departures from normal weather patterns are natural and not part of a humanity-created problem? What stupid, ignorant, guileless, witless, inexcusably dumb bastards those people are!!!!! Ignorance, like most things indigenous to nature, usually knows boundaries, but not in these people’s cases. The freakish weather events we continue to experience more and more often speaks to a tremendous, ever-expanding problem, and for unforgivably stupid individuals to stand in the way of those who would like to urgently address the problem is sinful and a transgression which should be punished with banishment sans food and water to the furthest, coldest corner of our Universe, and that is only if another meaner, more hostile Universe cannot be found first. And from that distant outpost the overly opinionated blowhards can bellow into the pitch-black skies to their heart’s content that global warming is just a devilish scheme manufactured by Washington liberals to subvert the coal industry and stymie oil and natural gas exploration off the pristine coast of Alaska.
And so we three Blahniks embody the tiniest rattle on the frank tail end of the rattlesnake, not the source of the problem this time around as was sometimes the case in the past, yet–based solely on our outlying position in extreme northeastern Pleasant Valley Township–standing last in line to be serviced and to have our power restored. Fair? Of course not, but why should fairness invade the world of power restoration when it doesn’t exist in any other venue in life? We will just have to continue waiting patiently (And admittedly sometimes NOT so patiently!) to have our power restored, hopefully by this evening at the latest, and then proceed onward and gratefully with our lives from there. Going without electricity is a major inconvenience, to be sure, but it is only that: A major inconvenience. There are much greater evils and adversities to be faced in life, and anyone who isn’t able to recognize this simple fact deserves to be without power indefinitely.
And then in the midst of everything else and to add insult to injury, I severely pulled the upper glute muscle on my left side while simultaneously pinching a major nerve in my hip as I lifted that deceptively heavy little generator out on the back deck, and after that I became something of a useless invalid—incapable of lifting anything relatively heavy and wholly unable to bend over at the waist without coming face-to-face with a searing, traumatizing jolt of pain that instantaneously radiated upward but mostly downward from my upper ass. And let me tell you, what hip-slapping (Cue the pun music at this juncture!) fun and party-worthy merriment that sling of fortune was and continues to be for Yours Truly!!
Yet my painful injury probably does represent the most appropriate anecdote to conclude this maudlin narrative “highlighting” three preponderantly gloomy days of life—my life, that is, but hopefully not yours; a gloomy truncated segment of my sojourn spent here on Earth–if indeed any stage of life should ever be snobbishly dismissed as “truncated” for fear of divine retribution…..
