14 January 2009

Sexy Weather

Don't let the map of Ohio fool you. It was just too good not to use, but rest assured nobody has sexier weather than Alabama and no people get a bigger boner for the weather than people in the South.

I know what you're saying. We don't get blizzards down here and we rarely suffer major floods. It's true, our weather is fairly temperate. What that means is any weather incident is newsworthy and likely to cause great excitement and widespread panic. For example:

Heat and Drought
Amazingly enough, Alabama can go eight weeks straight with no rainfall and yet maintain a humidity level of 100 percent. This is typically accompanied by dramatic reminisces of the "Drought of '64" in which the earth was so parched and cracked you could stare straight down into the yawning mouth of Hell itself. It is also marked by comments on how dead the grass is, water use restrictions and fantastic weather graphics on the nightly news indicating the Deadly Heat Index. Eventually, it will rain, and this is always celebrated with a rash of car accidents as soon as the first drops of moisture hit the asphalt.

Tornados
It is hard to get sexier than a 250-mph funnel of doom. This typically causes a frenzied circle jerk among the weather persons in the state. All regular television programming is suspended on a night in which tornadoes are forecast so each station can run competing maps of their Mega-Doppler 3000 Accu-Cast. There is exciting talk of "hook echoes" and discussions of "straight-line winds" and "super-cells." Midway through the night, the weathermen will remove their sport coats, loosen their neckties and roll up their sleeves to better indicate their tireless efforts to bring us the news that "no tornadoes have yet been spotted on the ground, but folks we've got a long night ahead of us." My feeling is that these guys are all reciting voodoo incantations in front of their radar, praying for the worst to happen.

Snow and Ice
As exciting as a tornado is, nothing quite gets the juices flowing for an Alabamian like the threat of winter precipitation. This is of course because we rarely get any significant snow or ice and even the smallest amount will close schools and interstates and any state office, because God knows a bureaucrat will look for any excuse not to work. The most interesting thing that happens is the Bread and Milk Run on the local grocery stores where old ladies will tussel like mud wrestlers over a loaf of rye that they would never normally ingest. For some reason, people in the South feel that any winter storm can be weathered as long as one has enough bread and milk. I've always thought that if one is to be snowed in for a week and possibly frozen to death it would be more enjoyable to have lots of soft drinks, snack cakes and bacon. You know, something worth having for a last meal. Whole wheat and 2-percent just doesn't fire me up.

I don't watch the weather. I don't have to. I can walk outside to see if it is hot, my mother will call me at 2 a.m. if there is the possibilty of tornadoes, and if I walk into the Piggly Wiggly to find all the bread is gone I know that somebody mentioned snow. So I buy Twinkies.

03 January 2009

Birthday


In a little over a month, provided I live that long, I'll be 39. I'm not particularly looking forward to it, though I'm not really dreading it either.

What is a birthday? I was excited to turn 16, but it was because that was the age for a drivers license. I was excited to be 18 because that meant I could vote. Typically, I was excited to be 21 because that meant I could legally buy alcohol. Beyond reaching those landmark years of increased privilege, birthdays don't really count for anything significant other than the passage of time.

This doesn't mean you don't notice them. When I turned 36 I fell into a significant depression due to a number of things, but as the year progressed I realized that a big part of it was that I dreaded my 37th birthday. I wondered why. Even turning "the big 3-0" hadn't bothered me at all. Perhaps it was because, at 36, you can still claim to be in your mid-30s, but at 37 you have moved into the late 30s area. And then there was that damned Marianne Faithful song, The Ballad of Lucy Jordan: "At the age of 37, she realized she'd never drive through Paris in a sports car with the warm wind in her hair..." Lucy ended up in the nuthouse, which is probably where I need to be half the time, but the good news is that once I actually turned 37 I was over it. As it turned out, it wasn't such a big deal after all, Paris notwithstanding.

So now here comes 39. People seem to put a lot of stock in this one. I have an aunt who used to tell people for years that she was 39, even when she was 60. "Thirty-nine and holding," she'd say. I think I may take the opposite approach and tell people that I'm FORTY-nine, so they'll be compelled to say, "My God, you look so fantastic!" and I can reply, "Thank you, yes I do."