February the worse month of them all 🤎

Buckle up the month of February is upon us all. It’s the shortest and most miserable month of them all. But as they say, the darkest hour is before dawn. It’s coldest, it’s snowy and salt encrusted up here in New York but spring is coming. Often this is the month we get the coldest of cold blasts in recent years, real-good thaws are exceptionally rare in February not that we would want such a thing as fire bugs like myself don’t like burn bans plus what good is winter camping in mud and muck? Rather shit by frozen this time of year.

One of the keys to surviving this month is to remain positive. To fend off the paranoia, which always seems to strike me so deep during this cold and dark month. The news media makes a lot of money off making people paranoid and fearful, even if much of what they report is exaggerated and not relevant to one’s own situation. I try to keep such thoughts out of my head, but you open social media and turn on the radio, and they are constantly reminding you – be afraid, be very afraid. It sells lots of laundry soap and KIA Automobiles. The cops and the commercial institutions are out to get you, we are told. To destroy your life, take away your freedom, steal your money and property. That’s what the news wants you to believe.

Some paranoia is justified – there really are people out to get you. But with the cold and generally depressing weather of this month, it can be hard to keep it in context. Now the mental health advertisers are probably analyzing this post in algorithms and are already getting to serve me up ads about how what you need is mental help — served up from home for only $25 a session. Whatever is my response! Tried that, going to the creepy guy in the basement, sitting in the couch. I thought it would improve everything in my world, giving me context, but ultimately I came to realize a diagnosis won’t help anything but billing — the buck stops with me.

February is so tough. But as Richard Hofsteader pointed out in his famous 1964 essay, “We are all the sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is not only afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but with his fantasies as well.”

It’s only 28 days and I will survive. April, she will come, as song says. Better days are ahead, it’s why I suffer in the cold apartment, slogging through the snow, on the dirty old city bus, working like a dog in office overlooking the old city dump and wastewater treatment plant. It is better now and only will get better. But it’s day by day as the slog through February is underway!