The Coldest Winter I Ever Spent

There's a saying attributed to Mark Twain, although that's very likely apocryphal, that the coldest winter he ever spent was a summer in San Francisco. I've been to San Francisco in the summer, and it gets cold. Really cold. Sometimes it even reaches 50°. But I've just acquired new evidence, and let me be the first to say: Mark Twain was a liar and a whore.

Because there are places in the United States -- in red-blooded, red meat-eating, Red Sox-loving, red man-killing America -- where the temperature drops below 40° Fahrenheit (277° Kelvin for those of you keeping track of how far we’ve come from absolute zero. Those last 13.75 ± 0.17 billion years just breezed by, didn't they?).  And there are real, live people who reside in those places.  Voluntarily.

I have become one of them, and it’s unbearable.

Sure, when I thought about living in New York, the idea that there would be real seasons -- four of them! -- sounded almost romantic.  In Los Angeles, we had summer for nine months, and summer-lite (10% less temperature!) for the other, I don’t know, five months. With so little change, the years kind of drifted together.

In the Bay Area, if the temperature dropped below 60°, I would complain incessantly, tell anyone who would listen about how I couldn’t feel my hands any more, that the frostbite was surely coming, this was it guys, and at least I’d had a good run, although it was too bad the world wasn’t going to benefit from my greatness any longer, and, oh, can you tell Kenny that I didn't forget about that $30 he still owes me?

L: The dead of winter in LA.  Don't let those blue skies fool you, it's a chilly 

75° out there.  R: Winter in New York, also known as "hell, frozen over".

But in New York, the temperature dropped down to 40° today.  40°!  I’m pretty sure water freezes at that temperature in California.  I wore three jackets, two shirts, two pairs of pants and full-bodied long underwear, and I could still feel the wind cutting through me like the wire that sliced the passengers in half at the beginning of Ghost Ship (if you haven’t seen it, enjoy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxGNLzte898 -- you can thank me later).

I’m fairly convinced that once the temperature drops below a certain point, our bodies can’t even register it anymore.  40°?  15°?  -10°?  It’s all just fucking freezing to me.  When your species evolves on the plains of Africa, where the temperature seldom drops below 50, there’s no need for the body to be sensitive to temperatures that drop as radically as they do in places like New York.  It’s like measuring the width of a hair with a schoolroom ruler: the two just weren’t designed for each other.  Is there something wrong, then, with the fact that people are living in places like New York?

Yes.  There’s a reason why, until just this last century, Antarctica was uninhabited.  

Of course, we don’t let that stop us.  It may be so cold that, even with three pairs of long underwear, two pairs of pants, a sweater, a hoodie, a down jacket, a chesterfield, three scarves, earmuffs, a knit cap and an ushanka -- so that I look like some unfortunate cross between an overweight Ewok and a multi-colored Michelin Man -- the cold still finds its way through the maze of clothing (a maze which, mind you, I myself cannot navigate, and I sadly discover this as I try to undress) and bites at my skin.  It might be so cold that the blood pumping through my cheeks slowly starts to freezes over, making talking, smiling, or really any kind of emoting, nearly impossible.  It’s like Botox, but with a dose of hypothermia tossed in for fun, too.

Just me on my commute to work.  And I know what

you're thinking, "Why is he wearing white after Labor Day?"

And yet, still, people live here.  Millions!  I don’t know how they do it.  And I've asked, but people don’t usually take too kindly when you approach them on the street and ask, a bit condescendingly (that’s usually how I ask all my questions), “How do you live here?  How!?”  If anybody finds out, could you let me know?