Salt, No Rock

It's the 12th day of februweary and the fifth stay at home and out of work day with my son, as winter tears wider our new assholes here in the northeast. Because of my custody arrangement, I'm with the boy every other week. Every single one of those fucking snow days fell on one of my days,so again, like Groundhog day in the fucking tundra, we're trapped here. Nannies and baby sitters and mothers in laws and live in grandparents and neighborly housewives who stay at home all day and are more suited for this madness and might accept a barter so one can go to fucking work..... are a luxury for most working stiffs, are not in my reality. Them's the stuff dreams are made of.

 I'm in a small apartment that looked like the lego bomb exploded and the rainbow of shrapnel is everywhere, just waiting to pierce a sock and break skin on my way to take a piss. There are mass graves of stuffed animals everywhere, splayed and contorted in a furry blur, There are downed and crushed paper airplanes, There are trails of crumbs that look like gunpowder trailing up to the bomb that is me.. and  coagulated spills of ample hues and jackets mere inches away from their hooks There is a purring purple vein doing para diddles in my temple as the boy keeps procrastinating his clean up. I wouldn't care but I've no playroom, no basement, no yard, no space, no ideas here so the path from important point A to more important point B is a critical one. One littered with these plastic landmines a lumbering giant like myself will be sure to make contact with.

 The grumpiness rolled in like a tasty wave on Feb.1 and a perfect storm of body blows and repercussion concussions have littered my human highway. There is a constant scrum in this pitiful month of trickery, between sadness and ridicule. I feel like that crying Native American from those TV ads, except a truckload of frat boys and lawyers have started chucking the trash at me while they high five without spilling their Bud Lites and I'm naked, laden with snotcicles and it's snowing. It's so goddamn white outside that mother nature seems like a racist thug handing out pamphlets that turn into noreasters when you most expect it. As for Philly, there's more salt on potato chips here than there are on the fucking roads. I was doing a little math as the thermometer pulsed to overdrive on the side of my head...

In my home town of Rochester, there lives what, less than 250k people? The ratio of Snowplow to people is around 20 to 1. They are in the Northeast, they know it and they are prepared. We may have had to dog sled it to the bus stop a few times but we made it. If you could sled down a drift from your bedroom window to get to that dog sled, you were going to school. Those roads were clear. Here in Philadelphia, the ratio of snow plow to people is about 100k to 1 in a city of 1.5 MILLION. That means if there's snow to your ankle, the kids stay home and your summer gets shortened. For comparison, this is the city of Comcast. The ratio of Comcast Vans to people is about 20 to 1, because people need their 120 channels of nothing when they are stuck inside on a snow day, crippled without a playdate,cabin fevered up the yin yang with only walls to climb ahead of them. As far as I'm concerned Pennsylvania is in the goddamn Northeast. Less buying Networks, more plows. Less signing baseball players in their late 30s, more plows. Less scrapple, more salt. if I could wring out the salt from my pores and melt a path to my freaking job, I would.  Hell if I started now, I would get there faster than a plow got to me.