Dancing for dollars
Standing on the front porch at 8:30 this morning and looking out at the frozen tundra which stretches out at my feet. The walkway is covered with snow and my precarious sneaker situation makes traversing the distance to the street difficult today. Should I shovel a pathway and be late for work? I have to decide. I vacillate on the notions of frozen feet, and then trek out into the snow, taking large steps in between, as though the larger footsteps are going to cut down on the amount of snow making its way into my shoes. Five steps in, I realize: fuck it-it doesn’t matter. I mine as well be barefoot or walking on hot coals right now. Where is my fascist neighbor with his workhorse son, I wonder, clearing the snow away as his dad stands behind him and tells him to hurry up? I don’t know, but even the mentally challenged seem particularly smarter than me today (as I contemplate the aforementioned whereabouts of my challenged neighbor—about whom the jokes abound—a nascent image presents of him, sitting indoors, feet kicked up as he swills Cherry Coke from a straw and simultaneously takes in an episode of Looney Toons).

I am listening to the The Knife’s Silent Shout on my car stereo today. I don’t know anyone who actually likes this album, but it seems relative to the vast frozen tundra, and I can only imagine its detractors probably don’t reside in the northeast. The great thing about Silent Shout, though, is that beyond the austerity, it’s an evenly measured dance album. And therein lies the awesomeness of this record for me, because not only could can you hang yourself to it, but alternately you could throw an all-night dance party (although that seems to posit the fact that it would be a pretty depressing dance party, where everybody feels suicidal and grim at the end, but I think what I was actually relating is the way I feel after 80’s night at the Fuze). I turn it up a notch in my car, and then try and imagine the appropriate dance moves to accompany the song I am listening to. People would ask me why I’m dancing so weird, and I’d tell them, it’s simple: my feet are frozen.