Polar Vortex Papal Plot!

There was a time when you could blame the Pope for just about anything. By the cosmology of many American Evangelicals, the Crown of the Whore of Babylon was behind every dubious thing--from the economy tanking to war to promiscuity and drug abuse. Somehow the Pope and the nefarious very worldly institution he leads profits from all of our many woes. It was also a fashion amongst many in the preaching to the shut ins over television types to promote current trends in the weather as being direct communications from God. One will note that only BAD WEATHER ever gets this treatment. It seems a thousand sunny days filled with Spring breezes is bereft of meaning, whereas a few dozen days dumping snow and cold are of amazing communicative import.

The other day someone directed me to respond to an email chain in its chain form. I did not do this. Instead I wrote a new email to the person I was actually attempting to communicate with. I found the other missives on the chain to be clutter and deemed most of the recipients thereof  inconsequential to what it was that I had to communicate. I try not to make these conclusions lightly. I’m sure all of these people love their children and are nice to animals and are fine professionals, but I only really wanted to talk to one of them. Or write this person. Writing is still what we mostly do in email, I thought. And what I wanted to write was for just that one person.

This was a mistake. It seems that the email chain  has become a form unto itself, with all sorts of fantastic rules. It is essentially a living document, a space for the expression of collaborative engagement. If you break the chain, or divert from it, your participation in whatever grand scheme of things will fail to be memorialized in its proper linear strata.

Please stick my penis in a blender. Who came up with the etiquette of this Kangaroo Court? And how can I opt out?

If email is now some new place between the informally spoken and the set in writing, a work in progress memo zygote group grope, then we are giving it far much more power than it deserves. In an effort to get around the apparent informal canonization of the exalted EMAIL (forever shall you divert your eyes), other forms of email have been invented.

There is the TEXT. This is for people who have forgotten how to use the phone. Or from people who would like to informally inform me of something and make it onerous for me to respond to them. It is actually a passive aggressive form of bossing me around. Do I take whatever you have just said at face value or do I try to TYPE WITH MY THUMBS? Now that I can’t have a Blackberry anymore (because Canada is not a country, it is the North Pole and thus its inhabitants are not people, but rather Santa’s elves, seemingly the flunk outs,  and therefore  the whole last cell phone I understood has gone splat*) I am going to take my vibrating Smart Phone and shove it up your ass. Go thumb respond to yourself and say hi to your prostate for me, you fascist.

Then there is the Instant Message. This is email as email once was—essentially email without the group grope. And it would function sort of as email if it weren’t also basically telling everyone the degree to which I am available, busy or even present. My work version also doubles as my phone system for no seemingly fathomable reason. In any case, it would be email, email-like, email-LITE if some creative person hadn’t gone and renamed all of the functions. Why don’t we rename all the vowels while we are at it and then insist upon universal use of phonetic spellings? It’s like email, but people spell worse. And although it is equally as well monitored as anything else going on in the work space, from that sort of instant memorialize everything electronic because we can perspective, the system seems to exist as a temptation for coworkers to inform me of who just broke wind. Or as the only medium literary home for the term ‘douche fuckles’.

 *Speaking of Canada, it was they who once controlled Blackberry, also known as Research In Motion. Once it was a high flying stock, a paragon example of the New Canada. Today this stock can be safely used as coasters. And thus Canada goes back to being what it really always has been: a slightly inhabited bit of the arctic, like Wisconsin. It used to be that the only thing we ever got from Canada was paper and wood pulp. But mostly we got its weather, specifically the Alberta Clipper. This steamship named air stream would occasionally dip itself into the states and send our wind chills down to North Pole (Canadian) levels.

This year something funny happened. The Alberta Clipper showed up early, Halloween, and it hasn’t left yet. Sort of like tar sands (another North Pole export) it has tunneled in and swept a path through our fair land. Much as Research In Motion was renamed Blackberry, the Alberta Clipper has been newly designated a Polar Vortex. That’s what you get for freezing Atlanta. Make southerners cold and suddenly they start spouting science fiction and speaking in ominous end of the world voices. Now I have been told that the term Polar Vortex actually dates back to 1942. You can’t bullshit me. I’ve been on this planet fifty damn years and I’ve never heard of any freaking Polar Vortex before. I’m sorry you’re all cold, but don’t just start making crap up like that.

All of that said, I have been told that this particular weather event is of some historic import. Thus it must be recorded in a medium of record for doing such, a record contemporary with its times—the opt in collective natterverse of the interweb, such as this WonderBlog ™. No doubt eyes in the future will be cast upon these words and it is important that some reflection of the times be cast back. It is indeed hard to depict in mere words how painful it has been to go outside for the past few months. The best I can do is perhaps depict the feelings engendered by this time of prolonged environmental clusterfuckles in slow motion montage form. May I close by saying that I have done absolutely nothing to deserve this nor the long lingering bug that has inflicted my being. So it has to be your fault. Damn you all to hell.

Thus my participation in the grand scheme of things has been properly memorialized in its original linear strata. We have been cold and snowed in for months and are now approaching freakish levels of being ape crap.