Late February and the Coming Spring
I don’t know about you, but I’m just about done with winter. Thank your deity of choice that spring is coming. Days seem to drag slower when you look upon the bleak, grey landscape that is the late winter. Days don’t seem as glorious, work days pass with all the expedience of a methadone trip, and the beer just doesn’t satisfy the way it should. I wonder if this is how it was for our ancient ancestors. To get up from our dry beds of dirt and grass, climb out of our shelters, look up at the sun as it strains in vain to break the clouds, see how it alights to bleak landscape that surrounds us and say, in cavemanish, “Well, fuck…time for breakfast I guess.” Cavemanish, by the way, I assume sounds like grunting; something akin to mornings before coffee. Those poor bastards didn’t even have coffee, either.
I don’t know what motivates us apart from the promise of warmer days. There’s something so subliminally depressing about late February. I mean think about it — there’s little else to look forward to, even in these modern times. We just cruised through a few months of feasts involving turkey, ham and beef of all shapes and sizes. We’ve celebrated everything from thankfulness, to peace on earth, the passing of a new year and even a day where we apparently have to love our significant others more than the other 364 days of the year; and what do we have to look forward to at this point? St. Patrick’s Day? Really?! I’m all for a day where we all pretend we’re drunken Irish, but is that really something to look forward to? I thought that’s what Fridays were for, without the assumed lie of being Irish.
For those of you not fortunate enough to have jobs which allow you a standard 5-day work week, my sympathies. Mundane as it is, it makes being a working slob that much more tolerable.
There’s something fundamentally depressing about waiting for warm weather. I think it comes from not having a set date, but rather being dependent upon Mother Nature finally conceding that it’s time for life to return to the world. When that actually happens relies completely upon the whims of a change of weather based upon the atmospheric patterns set in place by the position of the earth in relation to the star in which it orbits. Dress it up in whatever anthropomorphic deity of rebirth and renewal you wish, it’s still a pain in the ass for folks who like the certainty of nine to five schedules and the coming income tax deadlines. Even drunken fans of sports have more defined dates than the seasons. Ask a baseball fan when opening day is, and they’ll tell you with little trouble — ask them when warm weather will make the flowers bud and blossom and you’ll get a sigh of resignation and a shrug of uncertainty. I think that goes a long way to explain why moods are a bit sour and defeatist.
I’ll just buckle in and ride it out like the rest of you. Just know that you’re not alone in this. The rest of us are suffering right along with you.