Flash Epistle Number One

I won’t leave my apartment today. The outside temperature is just nine degrees, tropical for Polar Bears, but absurd for bipedal primates with diminished fur. When I was young, I (mentally) scoffed at oldsters who whined about the cold and had wet dreams about fleeing to Florida. How pathetically weak, I thought. Now that I’m old, I shiver to think just how clueless young people can be sometimes. This kind of cold is like a kick in the genitals, you freeze even before you feel the pain. Although Florida still remains my definition of a mongrel hell on earth, I am not above fantasizing about Costa Rica. But I won’t be going there today. The portents are bad and I am gelid as an ice sculpture hung in the gallery of my shabby ice box of an apartment. Winter is death that comes back like an evil memory every year. This morning all my energy is applied to forgetting.