Heat is an interesting thing. We can’t live without it. It’s the only reason any of us are alive at all, because of heat from the sun. Whenever I’ve told someone about our impending move to the Midwest, they have one of two reactions. If they haven’t lived there, they say “oh, but the winters, the winters.” They regale me with a tale of, perhaps, the one time they visited Minneapolis in the winter and wore a wooly coat and still felt like they were “wearing nothing at all”. Or they say they’ve been to Chicago in February and “…man”.

If they have lived there, they play the weather down as nothing. One person said “it’s just like the winters here [Portland], except, you know, colder”. Al and I were talking about this yesterday and I said “I’d like to point out that people live in Siberia. Ancient humans were living in Siberia before any modern technology, with nothing but mammoth bones to burn for fire”.

Even though it gets cold in the Midwest, it stays sunny for the most part. This means that at least you might feel happy even though you’re freezing. In the Pacific Northwest it doesn’t usually get below freezing for too long in the winter, but the wet and the grey will make you feel a hell of a lot colder.

We watched Rebel Without A Cause recently. We rented it on DVD from Movie Madness. I loved it. I particularly loved the music by Leonard Rosenman. When I put in the disc, the title page came up and the main theme played over and over again along with clips from the film. I was mesmerised. It is palpable, like a hand down your spine. You can see it. Your whole body carried away like watching your feet on the beach as the tide sweeps past them.