frost or flame, skeleton me

It is fucking cold in Nashville– more specifically, it is fucking cold in my new place where the gas has yet to be turned on. This evening, a space heater shall be acquired. Until then, however, holy fucking shit I'm freezing.

I like Nashville, for the most part. When I moved, it was time for a change of scenery anyway, and Nashville's a decent enough town. Every winter, though, I forget that I am so under-prepared physically, mentally, and otherwise for this cold shit.

And before you write me off with your pithy, smug horseshit about Cold? in Nashville? HA! I'm from Wisconsin Michigan Motherfucking-Antarctica, where it gets to 40 below and we tunnel through ice for beer runs on the backs of domesticated polar bears blahblahblah, let me just give a little personal context–

 Being a Houstonian means:

• owning one pair of flimsy gloves your entire life that you dig out of the bottom of the sock drawer annually for the whole three days you need might prefer them
• wearing scarves for decorative purposes only
• blissful ignorance to the life-changing delight of driving on ice
• thinking of snow predominantly in theory, as one of those distant novelties that makes for quaint, festive scenes in cinema of places with a "normal" climate

I've been in Nashville for four years now, and as much as I miss certain people and landmarks back home; I will forever curse the hell of a Houston August (or to a somewhat lesser extent, a Houston April, May, June, July, or September) and am appreciative to know the brilliance of living without it.

It is commonplace during a Houston August, in an effort to spare their own sanities, for many civilians to be forced into feigning some amount of acclimation to the constant filmy feeling of shirts adhered to their bodies with sweat, searing hot seatbelt buckles landing against their unsuspecting midsections, and the feeling– should one dare venture outdoors for distances longer than the strides from the car to the door of their destination– that they are somehow, in fact, hiking through warm, thick, invisible bisque rather than what fancy scientist types call "ground level atmosphere" and/or "air."

Even miles and months away, I cringe recounting the unfortunately familiar complete fucking turmoil of Houston in summertime.

This being said, at the very fucking least I could feel my damn toes. I'm from Texas. Hot, sticky, unrelenting, uncomfortably-warm-on-good-days, Gulf Coast Texas. Four years or no, I'm not used to this damned "four distinctive seasons" thing. Especially not winter. This whole not feeling your toes crap (indoors, no less!) is baffling. 

I'm off to get a space heater. Maybe later I'll stock up on queso, lime juice, and tequila, so I can just pretend this whole "winter" thing ain't happening.