Yesterday afternoon I spent a few comfy hours throwin' back a few at my fav Irish pub--flirting madly with the new hostess there--a beautiful young woman from the Dominican Republic--oooh, the lascivious thoughts that cruised the back drags of my mind as I kept my roving eye on this rather Gauguin-looking beauty as she sashayed around the restaurant area that spreads out and away from my reserved table--I have a full view of the whole joint. And my table has my name written all over it. It's back underneath the huge gold-filigree-framed mirror. I always sit under mirrors in restaurants. I love mirrors. Mirrors are in my genes. My dad was a world-class mirrormaker. He had his own secret formula he bought from a Belgium mirrormaker on one of his "secret" trips back east, in this instance to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, at that time the center for some of the biggest glassmakers in the world--like Pittsburgh Plate Glass. So I grew up with mirrors everywhere. My mother's whatnot shelves were built by my dad out of mirror glass. There was a big mirror over our record player. There was a mirror over my mother's organ. The coffee table, yes, was made out of mirror glass mounted on a walnut stand. By the front door, just to the left of it, was a full-length mirror (you could check out your look before you stepped out to face the real world). My parents's bedroom had two full-length mirrors on their closet doors. My mother's vanity had a big oval mirror built in to it. And there was a mirror over the head of their bed; however, there was no mirror over their bed that I knew of.
One of the waitresses asked me was I prepared for the snow storm that was headed our way. I said, yeah, I'd heard the teevee weather babes tryin' to scare hell out of us about a snow storm but I never paid any attention to them; they're wrong most of the time, especially in terms of intensity...." Blah-blah-blah, I chortled on.
After I wobbled back home, I was watching the U of Connecticut basketball team putting the Devil's curse on the Notre Dame Fightin' Irish (of course, the team is mostly black--there is a white dude who's a kind of a star on the team but he's not Irish) when they interrupted the game to warn of the coming snow storm. I looked out my window. Damn. Snowflakes. Big ones. Damn. They were sticking, too. Covering the roof behind me already. I switched over to Channel 11 and sure enough my fav weather babe was giving a "We interrupt this program for a special bulletin" weather report. (Rupert "Aussie Asshole" Murdoch hasn't "owned" Channel 11 yet, though he does now own two NYC teevee channels, Channels 5 and 9, plus the New York Post and the Wall Street Urinal (Journal). Good ole Rupert (also the name of Baby Stuey's teddy bear on Scott MacFarlane's "Family Guy" animated teevee series) is allowed by special dispensation from New York State and New York City to own as many newspapers and teevee stations at once as he wishes. The New York Post (it loses millions of dollars a year) makes a splendid umbrella substitute (only 35 cents) when you're caught out in a sudden rain without an umbrella. Homeless folks tell me it also makes a rough but OK asswipe in case you're unable to steal some real toilet paper from a public restroom somewhere--or a big batch of those paper towels, though paper towels are equivalent in terms of softness to sandpaper--hey, but, what the hey, they get the job done.
By evening the snow had seemingly left the city. The streets were wet but clean and the temperature was in the 40s. Channel 11, like Murdoch's channels, have their 11 o'clock news at 10 o'clock. So at 10 I checked out the weather. The Channel 11 weather babe, and I used to work in the building she's in (Channel 11 was once owned by the New York Daily News, a rather drab newspaper but at least a fairly representative New York City newspaper) and she was very friendly--very tall, very blonde, very statuesque--and this babe was saying it was already snowing like a double-demon in the pits of New Jersey and it was headed our way, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I thought, "Why don't I go up and sleep on the roof tonight--take my camera--dig? Which I did.
At about 1:30 am, I felt a wetness dripping on my face--I was in a sleeping bag, well bundled up, not cold at all. I woke up and Jesus it was snowing like the proverbial motherabuser--I tried the movie camera from where I slept but I couldn't get any images, just splatters of exploded snowflakes on my lens. I rolled up tight and tried to sleep some more. The next time I woke up here's what I found:
From my sleeping bag looking toward the Empire State Building--6 am.
Shooting toward the Penn Central Building--the snow was blowing into my camera--it looks like little moons crashing into the window on my universe.
Looking off the roof west--down onto a corner on Broadway at 6:30 am.
And it's still snowing at 4:20 pm--
And this weather makes me thirsty. And this weather makes me sappy and conversational. Snowed in--except, my fav Irish Pub is warm and awaiting my presence--besides, it's only a few doors of clean sidewalk away.
Adios,
thegrowlingwolf-adoringthesnow
for The Daily Growler
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