Hot Hot Hot Boulder

On today, February 28th, it is 75 degrees. For someone who grew up in, say, Truth Or Consequences, this is not a big deal. For a life-long Snow Belter, this is akin to owning a winter condo in Hades.

In Eastern Standard Tribes, Corey Doctorow envisions an interesting remix for future demographics: loyalties based on timezone, rather than national or cultural similarity. I'd take his "longitudinal affiliation" a step further: cross-cutting all loyalties by both timezone and climatic distance from the Equator, creating, in essence, a grid of collective sympathies.

The Eastern Time Zone, then, unites everyone from Phoenix, NY, to the Peruvian coastal region, yet subdivides them into binary latitudinal unities, which concurrently unites people across temperate zones. This mad scrambling of physical identification may be all we need to at last find some form of global unity-in-diversity (as it supplants commitment to ethno-idealogical positions with something far more fundamental), transcending our historical divisions by falling into alignment with newer, more arbitrary sympathies.

Irregardless my trans-geographic fantasies, needless to say this weather is scrambling all notions of what constitutes "proper activity" given the time of year. I've spent months gradually paring down my actions to all things indoor (I don't ski, thanks), only to find the summertime doors blown open with the mountain breezes of unexpected emo-swinging, like a man in solitary confinement flung suddenly into the outer reaches of space. Yeehaw.