"Its a Winter Fucker-Land!"

It snowed today in the dirty south. Snow in the south is cute and cheeky, not cruel and painful as it is in the north. Although southerners are quite ill-prepared to deal with it. Tons of wrecks and cars spun out in the middle of people's yards and people trying to use newspapers to scrape snow from their windshields. I remember the first time i pulled my snowbrush out here to dust off my car and a small crowd assembled to observe that "crazy new-fangled device" i was using. And its not like we're in south Florida here either. Its Tennessee. Snow happens. But for some reason southerners are in denial over this. In fact the other day it was 20 friggin' degrees out and this idiot undergraduate girl at my Over-Privileged University was wearing flip-flops on her bare feet. Flip flops. 20 degrees. Seriously. I hoped her french manicured snaggle-toes would grow necrotic and fall off.

I did see some amusing things this morning--like people who clearly were not familiar with snow very gingerly tip-toeing through it (we're talking it has barely covered our sidewalks here people, and its the really wet kind that melts as soon as you step on it). It was adorable! Its as if they were afraid it was going to hurt them if they woke it up. Even with a vestibular system primed for northern weather, i've bit it enough times on the ice to know how to walk on it but i can tell you this light dusting here is not a real threat to balance.

Snow lets me be the asshole here though. I can tell my "You call this snow? Well i grew up in Cleveland Ohio..." stories. Southerners dont know about dry snow. They cant believe some snow is so cold you cant pack it into snowballs, or that it can blow into drifts up to 7 feet tall. They dont know that it takes a LOT of snow to close schools in Cleveland Ohio. "You mean you walked to the bus-stop when there was snow on the ground?" they ask. Yes, dearies. If we hid indoors everytime it snowed like you guys do, we'd never have gotten an education. And we had these crazy new-fangled inventions called "boots" up there.

The Head made an observation today on the drive to work that snow down here is "hillbilly insurance. " That is, hillbillies do not go out in it. They fear it. Or perhaps they are too busy trying to figure out how to smoke it. So snow is a great thing here in the south.

Everyday, i drive past a hardware store that sells sleds. Big sleds too, with the runners that any of my fellow northerners know require a LOT of snow to work properly. I always thought that would be such a cruel gift to a southern child. Hey Bobby-Joe, here's a sled for Xmas. You can use it maybe once a year if you're lucky.

Although now that i think about it, what the hell do southern kids do all winter? Make mud-balls? Shit, snow was the cheapest toy and babysitter money could buy and it was our sole source of amusement from October through April. No wonder kids are so fat around here. They must sit inside and play video games all winter. Or smoke meth. I'm going to have to buy a snow machine for Baby Head when he gets older so he doesnt turn out to be an obese World of Warcraft freak living in my basement until he's 40.