So, I’ve moved to a hostile and unfamiliar region of North Central Wisconsin. The many unforgiving conditions blend an icy brew. Obviously, it’s tits cold up here. Also consider that the locals want to kill me, there’s zipola for entertainment and a girl I can’t see enough of is 320 miles south. All this and I’m still having a blast.

Besides an incredible old house plunked down in the middle of a Calvin and Hobbs style winter landscape, I have the time, peace of mind and energy to enjoy it fully. This is a good scene up here, it changes your thinking. Aha! I do have purpose! I’m experimenting, I’m learning, I’m noticing shit.

Cold, I’ve found out, is a real ass kicker. A deep whiff of the arctic air freezes the snot right in your nose and makes a smoker's lungs feel like they’re turning inside out. The weather meters out the kind of ass kicking you’d get from Mr. T if he found out that you shit on the hood of his Rolls Royce. Sometimes, it’s just what a body needs.

Cold is a taskmaster. It forces you to stay on top of it, to try and overcome it. Heat we’re more at the mercy of. You can try to sweat it out, but that requires concentration and being still. Cold demands action.

You can beat all weather with machines, of course, and be done with it. That’s the institutional way to take care of things and I think it stinks. Oh, I’ll run the furnace, but the thermo don’t go no mo’ than 63. Who wants to feel like they’re in an overheated dorm room or 3^rd period math? Not me.

I make fires. The heat feels great on my skin. It won’t warm me to the core, but I like it anyway. There’s tradition in fire building, a base and elementary satisfaction. The wood I burn was cut by my grandpappy in the 70’s, so fires take on a vintage quality. I try to burn them like they did in the old sex scenes: low in the hearth and glowingly warm. They’re roasting fires, as opposed to roaring ones, and there’s an art to building them. It requires careful planning and execution. Also, I get to chop the logs in quarters with a long handled ax. It’s pretty awesome.

Bundling up against the cold is fun for similar reasons. You get to wear more and more of your favorite clothes. All of them if you want! Armor, here, is absolutely necessary and easy to personalize. I bury myself under layers of cotton, fleece and wool. I am safe against danger.

Or am I?

Winding thoughts, wild proclamations and severe winter solitude wrap me like a wool mummy, and I love it. But Walden this ain’t, nor will it ever be. I’m not in the middle of nowhere. I’m in the middle of an industrial, capitalist country. Trucks loaded high with newly felled pine trees roar down the highway, the sound cuts through the forest and spreads wide over the lake. The mill down the road spits smoke and sawdust at me as I pass. It hates me, just like the people who work inside. If I were to admit to wanting to be a naturalist, I would meet with the familiar look that screams "He’s not one of us! Don’t serve him anymore Rumplemintz!" After coming a thousand miles, I still haven’t escaped my enemies. Pressure exists and it seems I’ll never be free.

But even if I could be Thoreau and have a zillion acres all to myself, is that something I would want? The deeper the woods, it seems, the more entertaining you have to find yourself. I’m quite sure I’m self-indulgent enough. Pure solitude can’t be good for someone like me. The hottest piece of writing to come out of such a situation has been Ted Kazinsky’s Manifesto. More and more, this seems a something I would be wise to steer clear of.

Maybe it’s just as simple as being in-between that seems to suit me. Life on the duff, life like a long game of defensive dodgeball. Admire the footwork, it’s right there in the snow, and breathe easy. They can surround you, but they’ll never close all the way in.