Kikkoman

Kikkoman
by Pat A Physics

All snow can grab your energy, your sound, your smell, your thoughts, your color, your movements, your observations and never give back a thing other than the absence of things.  Take North Dakota, for instance.  If you go to North Dakota to protest losing your humanity to the snow, then you will come back a corpse-sickle.  I once saw someone form a batch of snowballs in preparation for an all out war.  He took too long to get ready, and he got his ass ambushed by the enemy.  They used his snowballs against him.  Do you go to these movies that feature people that cry?  Well, there are people who pay good money to go out into the snow, drive on hazardous roads, then go inside a dark room and watch people cry and get all bummed out- then they go home sad on the hazardous roads!  The other day, I was making nachos and I accidentally brushed the temperature control on the refrigerator.  Later on, my refrigerated food was okay except for my beer and my soy sauce.  It was Chinese night, and I had been stiffed on soy sauce packets (plenty of fish sauce, of course).  My idea was to scoop out some frozen soy sauce and microwave it.  When scooping it out, I realized that it was a lot like the snow you see on the street.  The soy sauce exploded and bubbled all over my microwave.  God damn street snow!  You know how they told you in school how all of us kids were all special like snowflakes.  Then to help us meditate on the analogy, the teachers gave us green and red construction paper, and walked us through a procedure to make symmetrical cuts in the paper to form snow flakes.  I remember thinking, “free day” because there was nothing for me to do because I hate art.  I took a pair of scissors, dismantled them using a pen and some leverage, and began carving “vanilla ice” into my desk with one of the blades.  Most people use trash can lids in my neighborhood to fly down a particular hill in the park when it is a snowday.  I got the idea to use these political signs from a person’s yard that were just sitting there so people could ignore them.  I passed them out to all of my friends, and they worked way better than the trash can lids.  Then this man told us to put the signs back.  He had run up to the hill in his pajamas, and was shivering in the snow.  He looked very upset because he knew that he was taking away our new sleds, and also felt violated because we had trespassed, stolen his property, ruined the signs, etc.  The snow was falling and we were standing there awkwardly in silence.  It was not my fault, it was the snow!  The snow had ruined this man’s political endeavors.  We collected the signs, and brought them to his house.  We tried to put them back the way they were, but they were all bent and hard to read.  There is this thing that people trot out about how nuanced language is.  They tell you that the Inuit have fifty words for snow.  This is bologna.  The word for snow that an Eskimo uses has the same amount of forms as its English counterpart.  The fact that people continue to lie about this only proves that snow is able to take away what little dignity we have as human beings.  It is incredible.  Snow is unforgiving, unmerciful, lacks clemency, leaves you naked and thoughtless.  Snowstorms, blizzards, flurries.