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(Written quickly Tuesday March 4th 2008, during the mid-late afternoon)

Snow.  Death. 

Are the 2 mutually exclusive?  Not today.  Today, friends, they are, one and the same.  Here’s some more, commas, just to make, the whole snowstorm, more, dramatic.

When I got up this morning and stumbled to the window there wasn’t any snow.  Weatherman (neah, weatherperson) was a little off, no big deal.  Easier ride to work is all that means.  I mosied to the shower wondering just how the latest Doppler Millimeter Wave Telekinetic Super Sized 52 oz Radar could miss something.  As it turns out I missed something. The Weather was coming later.  “Later” apparently means right after I put my pants on.

Nothing had started to accumulate yet so the drive to work was business as usual.  The snow was heavy and blowing but most folks were at work already so the Chicken Little Factor didn’t have time to manifest.

By noon it was really deep and the white fluffiness was still coming down like Mel Gibson and Scott Weiland sharing the back of a patrol car.  The parking lot was covered.  You could tell what direction the wind had been blowing from how the snow sloped on the cars.  It was pretty cool, even though inside the building unholy things were happening.  People weren’t able to get things from their car and some even had to eat lunch from the vending machine instead of going out.  Unnatural forces at work for sure.  A call to an excorcist was made.  Only the smokers were brave enough to venture outside but if they don’t smoke they will have to be excorcised too and that would run up the evil spirit vanquishing tab.

Still, around this time (noon remember) people started looking toward the drive home. 

Hmmm….weather advisory ’til 6:00…supposed to snow until 4:00…when to go home?  There was much conversation.  My take is the smartest:  continue as usual and head for home around 6:30.  The option is to leave at 3:00, block up the roads so the snow plows can’t plow, and get home around 6:00.  Experience has told me that if you leave early to get home to beat weather the traffic will inversely effect your arrival time.  If I’m in the car for 3 hours I would prefer to be heading to another a state (perhaps to see a gig) and not stuck in a traffic jam with fearful drivers.  It makes zero sense to leave early to avoid the bad weather that was going to be over by the time I got home.  It was obvious for me to leave at 6:30 after the snow has stopped and the rest of the city has acted as my personal road warming crew. 

Then in an effort to reduce employee costs the company decided to shut everything down at 3pm while the roads were still sheets of snow.  The cost reduction would presumably come about by an undisclosed portion of the workforce getting shellacked by other drivers whose companies also have a little too much overhead.

Some roads are impassable.  Parts of 141, (I’m rifling through the update e-mails), all eastbound 1-70 lanes in some spots, and traffic.com (as of 3:00 departure mandate) had all but one single thorougfare at a 10 out of 10 for I-hope-you-peed-before-you-left.  It was a clean sweep by 3:30.  There were incidents and accidents clogging every traffic artery like an all you can eat Bacon tasting.  The accidents were all deemed to be dramatic but isn’t it dramatic in any circumstance that you skid across 4 lanes of a highway?  I remember doing that on 270 on my way to Shag’s house back in Jan ’93.  Spun out in my 84 Olds at Ladue & 270, bumped the median, car shut off, restarted it before the other cars hit me.  That night I slept like a well cared for refugee on the floor of his house so that I wouldn’t die on the way home in the middle of the night.  My gut tells me that’s what would have happened.  I could smell it.

I digress.

This is where my awareness kind of checks out.  When people start to shout statistics about snowfall, traffic, etc over their cubicles like we’re on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange it’s time for me to turn up the headphones.  When it comes to things I can’t control I have an aggressive policy of not giving a shit.  Even more true when it comes to the weather.  But I kept my mouth shut because I didn’t want to say, “I’ll wait for you people to clean off the road for me.  Think of yourselves as my own personal valets.  How fast will you get home by blocking snowplows, thereby ensuring you drive in the 6 inches of snow coating most of I270, I70, I40, I55, and I44 just to get home “on time”?  *&#@ all that Silent Bob.”

I’m expecting my drive home in the darkness to be slow and uneventful.  I’ve already got my mix cd picked out.

The names have been changed or excluded to protect myself from retalitory strikes.

(as it turns out I started cleaning off my car at 6:45 and was home at 7:30.  I briefly lost control once because the car in front of me at Manchester & 141 slammed his breaks and went careening off to the side).