Inn Keeper’s Disease

The blizzard's moving in
Looks like you're wrong again
When cabin fever hits
It sends us into fits
Of innkeeper's disease
And screaming in the trees
The blizzard never ends
The blizzard buries them

Blizzards, Buzzards, Bastards -- Scissorfight

I haven’t been outside for more than five minutes at a time over the last three weeks of this wretched winter. My skin feels like I’ve been belt-sanded while I sleep. Vitamin D levels are at all-time lows. The cars have slush udders and are rusting out before my eyes. The driveway is where hips go to break. Yesterday I staggered to the shower, turned it on, stepped in and shrank my head in water piped down from the taiga thanks to an empty oil tank (who knew the oil guy can’t get his hose from the street over a eight-foot tall cornice of grey plow drifts to the pipe around the back of the house?). The dog defecates freely inside the house, having long ago called bullshit on any of my attempts to drive it out into the drifts to do its business. Strange birds desperate for food and water hang around the feeders and fight among themselves. The 180 miles of daily driving on the wonderful highways of eastern Massachusetts each and every morning are doing evil things to my soul.

People my age who live in this wretched snow globe all have a Blizzard of ’78 story and every single one has the following structure:

1.  It begins in a frat or dorm in Allston, Brighton, or the Back Bay
2. It involves a “packy run”
3. on x-country skis or a sled
4. A guy named Sully
5. An arctic expedition through snowdrifts
6. Fruit-flavored brandy or schnapps
7. Massive intoxication
8. The police

This winter seems to be more about lynching the new governor, Charlie “The Darkness” Baker, the decrepit MBTA, and sucking it up. In the words of the Norwegians, there is no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing.

But I love it here. For this makes us Spartans.

Author: David Churbuck

Cape Codder with an itch to write View all posts by David Churbuck