This is the view from my car this morning as I shoveled the heavy, gods-forsaken white evil from my poor little car.

I am pretty tired of this shit.

What makes it extra-special funny it that I spent half a decade or so in Los Angeles, a city where snow is only used to discuss drugs or as an epithet for a person afflicted with a too-dry scalp or eczema. After years of perfectly warm weather, where the worst weather you could hope for in the winter was a little extra wind and two days of rain, I realized that I missed the midwest and its seasonal changes. I wholeheartedly missed the fall with its glorious changing colors and delicious smells. I remembered fondly the fun of building snowmen and tobogganing of winter.

“What the hell was wrong with me?” I think now.

Fall lasts for all of about three minutes nowadays, and I haven’t touched a sled in years. Building a snowman is nothing more than an invitation to bronchitis and frostbite. In the mid-west, it basically goes from freaking hot – a hot that is so saturated with moisture that your sweat retreats back into your pores from some kind of embarrassed, atomic-level kind of penis envy – to torrential, monsoon-like downpours to, finally, months of freezing rain, biting, ball-cracking winds and the worst drivers ever to see the inside of an SUV.

All summer we complain about how hot it is and how we can’t wait for cooler weather.

All winter we complain about how cold and miserable it is and beg for summer.

This kind of thinking, actually, explains a lot about American politics.

We have a year or so of promises, rhetoric, hope and optimism – if not optimism of a great President, at least the optimism of getting one that sucks just a little bit less. This is followed by three years of greed, corporate empowerment, tort reform, increased wealth to the rich, more abuses to the middle class, war, plague, famine, and awful speeches cutting into our current stock of grotesque and horrible prime time television.

We forget how shitty these campaigns are, how we all lose a little intelligence and a chunk of our souls as we sill, raptly watching this knife-fight between corporately owned, elitist ass-clowns with our rights, our wages and our lifestyles as the spoils for the victor. By the time the voting starts, most free thinking and intelligent ‘US’ers are so jaded, depressed and unconcerned about the outcome that it doesn’t matter if it’s been shown that our votes count for dung nowadays.

When the campaigns begin, like summer, we are filled with hope: that first bit of sunshine through the old, gray clouds promising good things to come. Little do we remember that eventually we will be so burned out from excessive exposure that we’ll actively avoid what we waited so long to get.

Then, as the new monarch takes the blood-crusted scepter from the current reigning fascist and snuggles into their throne made of poor and decrepit veterans and atheist’s babies and begins the ritual disbanding of our rights and protections and the funneling of middle class income into their latest human rights violating pet project, we see that there was no change. The long dark winter is back and we can’t escape.

In the summer you can find shade, but during the winter, the cold creeps into everything, everywhere. It’s here, and it’s here for a long, long while. You can complain all you want (“Cold enough for you, Bob?”, “Aren’t wiretaps without warrants illegal, Bob?) but complaining changes nothing. There’s only one way to deal with the problem.

Move to a place where the climate agrees with you.