O, pernicious infiltrator...

Thursday 2/12/26

I am writing well. Charm is among the hardest qualities to realize in writing. There is very little in the history of writing that will make us say, "That's charming." You'll see it sometimes in F. Scott Fitzgerald's writing, but not a whole lot of other places. This is all from right now. Start of a piece I need to get done about winter horror films, which is also for my horror film book. And what do you know: Writing that is actually funny. And poignant, learned, accessible, and incisive.

It has been said that the grisly events of the Donner Party were set in motion by a simple but telling exchange:

“I’m really cold,” said one person.

“I’m really hungry,” replied the other.

This isn’t true. Well, I don’t know that it’s true. Let’s call it in the thematic ballpark. Winter is frightening. Look how easy it is for winter to stress people out. To send them in a panic to the store to purchase two weeks’ worth of food and a six-month supply of toilet paper for those four-inches of snow that are said to be coming upon the morrow. What will we do? How can we assure survival? Without milk, the coffee may have to be taken black. Small children see their parents rushing headlong in assorted directions— stammering, short-fused (but somehow still able to post on Instagram)—and entertain terrible thoughts like, “What will become of me? I saw how readily the turkey fit in the oven at Thanksgiving.”

Another untruth, perhaps, but we do lose our minds, which shouldn’t cause us to lose sight of winter’s power despite our ever-increasing tendency to become irrational drama queens regarding what ancient humans—like, say, those back in 1991—would’ve regarded as basic and uneventful precipitation. A little bit of cold can go a long way. Walk for forty-five minutes in gusty twenty-degree weather and an hour later you’re apt to see that your face is still red when you look at in the mirror. Staying power. The wind burns us. It excels at finding its way through gaps in our attire that we didn’t know were there. As Keats wrote: “O, pernicious infiltrator…” Then again, Keats may have been too busy shoveling snow to write that.

And what if you drink too much at the bar and then tell your friends who aren’t that interested in you at that point because they’re trying to hook up with people they won’t know by tomorrow that you’re just gonna walk home. Then you tumble out on your merry way, a hale fellow warmed by all that good liquor—or seven piss-water beers—and your head is swimming so you sit on a lonely bench with the intention of resting only for a minute or two, closing your eyes as sleep says, “Hello, I’ve come to you, embrace me!”

Boom, you’re done. That’s it. Death by winter.

Or maybe you’ve been on a hike and thought you knew the way back only you aren’t sure where you’re at now exactly and the sun is going down. Soon it will be lower than the trees. Your heart starts to race. You tell yourself to calm down, or else you could be in real trouble here, before seeing a familiar landmark and letting out a big sigh of relief and a laugh as though you were being silly all along, save that you know better.

We’re all versed in horrific tales about frostbite and skin that is rended from bodies by nontraditional monsters like zipper jackets. You don’t like triple-dog-dare-you business in A Christmas Story the first time you see it, because you think about what you’d do if your tongue was stuck to a metal pole and you had to rip yourself free.

There’s mystery in winter. A type of white darkness. Think of our first glimpse of Narnia on the other side of the wardrobe. A winter wonderland or a place of wolves and witches? Three drops of blood on snow say volumes, don’t they? They’re different than blood we see on a city street in summer. In the case of the latter, we’re apt to think someone had a bloody nose. That sucks. You recall having some of those. But blood on snow means…something else. And that something else isn’t good. By the pricking of my thumbs…