A Cold Journey

An old-fashioned man vs. nature story that will leave you shook.

Snow plummeted from the sky in a way that reminded me vaguely of The Sopranos.

It crunched under my boots Breaking Bad-esquely, and a Game of Thrones-style wind began to whip and howl from every direction.

I tightened my scarf, which was the same color as the couch from Friends.

With everything before me a vast and whorling Seinfeldian expanse of white, I trudged on like I was every character in The Wire at once. 

When the blizzard intensified, I got overwhelmed like the characters on Friday Night Lights. 

At some point the sky cleared — miraculously — relieving my deepest terrors of dying in the snow in a way that called to mind the narrowly avoided political disasters around which the plot of The West Wing revolved.

And yet the fair weather was not without cost: something about it troubled me that left me reminded of a not-particularly-funny episode of Everyone Loves Raymond. 

Was I actually more depressed, like some of the characters on Succession, now that an unforgiving winter storm was not here to overshadow all my other problems?

The question and others like it prodded me as I journeyed onward the way that questions about aliens prodded people on The X-Files.

No sooner had I accepted that, at heart, I was a masochist whose happiness all but depended on his own discomfort, than the snow returned full-force like an episode of Young Sheldon coming back after a commercial break.

It was only then that I realized the weather had never really cleared; I was in the middle of a subzero hurricane, and my brief reprieve from its howling arctic furor had simply been the hurricane’s eye passing over me, and I found myself longing with double dread for the absence of bad weather again, like an American Idol contestant no longer on the show but wishing they were even as they acknowledge that they were never happy when they were on the show because of the inescapable toxicity of fame’s pursuit.

The opacity of the whiteout conditions were even greater on this side of the hurricane’s eye-wall, and treading through these conditions brought to mind, in the most predictable and morale-eroding way, the television show Fargo based on the movie Fargo.

I lost sensation in my appendages as I lumbered forth into the frigid oblivion of swirling once-tropical, now-polar squalls, and for a devastating series of moments, I felt like a more tragic figure than all of the main characters of Mad Men combined. 

It was so cold, the edges of my brain started to freeze inside my skull, and I started not being able to remember where I was going to the point that I felt like the television show Lost itself. 

I guess it was best that I didn’t remember my destination because, wherever it was, I didn’t get there, and for some reason this brought to mind in a haunting way the closing credits of The Simpsons.

I died in the snow, as per my terrors, and with my eyelids frozen open, so when I wept for myself, the tears turned to ice in my eyes.