Revolution

"It is true that behavior cannot be legislated, and legislation cannot make you love me, but legislation can restrain you from lynching me, and I think that is kind of important."

-- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., "Speech at Oberlin College," October 22, 1964

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The snow hit Cincy hard yesterday and last night. Two separate storms, one giant dump. A series of Level-2 and -3 winter emergencies all across the Tri-State, and 40,000 people without power--people, breathing warmth into hands cold and hard as porcelain, baking with the gas oven open just to make kitchens bearable, or lying under folded blankets to contain body heat. There is no driving to warmer climes, no cars idling in driveways or around corners, no cars at all, on the roads, anywhere, besides plows and patrols.

Drivers will be ticketed in Cincinnati today if there is no emergency drawing them out of their homes. The roads are empty but of walkers, puffy with layers and hats. Almost every business, and certainly every school and daycare, is closed today, a white, gray, and blue day, a snow day.

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Stranded in the stuff last night at my girlfriend's house, we watched movies all day. I ventured out once, before driving was outlawed. I felt like some kind of rogue frontiersman, leaving for an hour to hunt and scrape the ice on wood, but in fact I just needed to run home, shower, charge my phone, and change my socks. The side streets were worse, of course, and there are alleys too narrow for plows, but too deep for toddlers. The city is an icebox frozen shut, the people as stuck as uncracked cubes in a tray.

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Late, we left the cold apartment for the Esquire Theater on Ludlow. Our cinema treat of the evening: Revolutionary Road, the reunion flick for Winslet and diCaprio.

Something about the trailer's soft-focus clips made me think it was a movie to warm a bunch of twentysomethings out on the desolate town, but the movie is harder than you think. It was unnerving, challenging, and agonizing, and I loved every minute: Mendes' finest work since American Beauty.

And the brief graces of Michael Shannon's performance, a small but poignant, sharp cheese grater of a role--he plays Kathy Bates' son, and trust me, you can't miss him--was something to blog about. The essence of a fool in a Shakespearean tragedy: the hand that holds the mirror and smacks you with your own warped reflection.

We got back and threw frozen sheets of ice like Frisbees from a stoop. One of mine almost hit a car, another broke into a million pieces of ice and made divots in the snow like salt.

After the movie, I lay in bed, awake for hours. No man on that screen is admirable, yet they are all imitable; in that dark time in the cinema, I realized with confusion and revulsion that I knew these men, that I had felt as they had felt, and seen what they had seen...to an extent. It troubled me, in the simplest sense of the word, disturbed and upset me. It did not anger me to see myself in these characters, nor did it frighten me, but it did shake me. Someone had dropped a stone into the creek, and I was a bug on the surface of the water, suddenly in storm, rolling in ripples. I felt overwhelmed by the shambles of manhood I had witnessed, and in my baffled introspection, I asked myself how never to become like that. As Ciardi's poem might ask, Was I the lion? or his teeth?

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Today, there is of course no work. We have watched more movies. My girlfriend has made a variation of puppy chow which she calls "puppy poop." (She has replaced the Chex with Special K, and the frosted lump simply melts in your mouth like a rose crumbling in your hand. Delish.)

Inside two sets of socks, my toes feel nothing but cold and the seeming heat of wrinkles. They are like cracked posterboard, bent but unfeeling.

We threw a cat onto the snow, though. That was fun.