Blizzard 2017

By Sam Burnham
@C_SamBurnham

​Sitting here waiting on the "Snowpocalypse", blizzard, Breadandmilkotopia or whatever the trendy thing to call this latest bout of winter weather is. The Weather Channel is calling it "Helena" since they've gone to naming snowstorms as if they were hurricanes or something. That's kind of silly. Hurricanes are dignified. You can evacuate. They might miss you, take a last minute turn and go another direction. These winter storms hit every other week up north. You can't evacuate. You just have to sit there and take it like when the preacher starts preaching on giving the Sunday after payday. you can't get up and walk off in the middle of it. You're just stuck.

It's not "Helena". It's just snow. 

The Great Lewis Grizzard

That has me thinking that we need less Blizzard and more Grizzard. That great Georgia writer that blessed us all with his marvelous tales of a great American named Weyman C. Wannamaker Jr as well as his own unwarranted and undeserved exile in Chicago where the snow easily reaches the third architectural tier of the Sears Tower on a biweekly basis and the negative wind chills are measured in Kelvin. 

His name is even spelled a lot like blizzard. But they didn't rhyme. He stressed that his name was not pronounced like blizzard as there are different meanings in the pronounciation of that spelling. /griz-ZARD/, the correct pronounciation. means "Wild Stallion". To say it in the manner that rhymes with blizzard means "sissy welfare recipient". So let's remember him as the wild stallion that he was. 

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But he is gone and in heaven where it never snows or even drops below 50 degrees for any reason and no one ever has to wear socks unless they just want to. We are left to try to navigate frozen roads in search of milk and bread (and maybe find the unusually crowded liquor store) in order to survive until the sun comes back out and that most southern of weather phenomena - sublimation - restores order to the universe.  

And this year there is talk of brine. The road crews are out pretreating the roads with a mystical solution that will supposedly keep the roads from freezing over to begin with. Like pixie dust but in convinient water form. It seems to me that all these chemtrail fanatics could talk their Area 51 buddies to dropping the magic brine from airplanes to keep the snow and sleet from falling to begin with, at least in the South. 

I noticed that next door in Alabama, Governor Bentley delared a state of emergency in all 67 counties. 67 counties in the whole dang state. Governor Deal started picking Georgia counties and after designating a state of emergency in 78 he figured he had beaten Alabama bad enough that he stopped in Central Georgia, near Macon. If he had gone on down near Lumber City, folks would have accused him of running up the score. Including Ludowici would have just been embarassing to our neighbors and they would have tried to retaliate in the ongoing courtroom battle known as the Water War in which we fight over which state is using too much water.

And now we're waiting on frozen water to come kill us all. The irony. 

Ok, I'm already stir crazy and we haven't seen anything more than a few random sleet pellets and a bad gust of wind. It is so cold that I saw a Democrat with his hands in his own pockets earlier but that's another story for another day. 

So I'll go now. Y'all stay warm and look out for each other. We're all in this one together.