I love the thought of cold weather: snow drifting through the air lazily or blowing sideways, drawing curtains across the night sky; blankets of soft white covering everything in sight; conversations visible in frozen breathmist as much as audible.  Past that, there is no ideal.  Big city lights reflected off of ice-covered streets, or a barren countryside night turned to day with the heightened full-moon; either is enough of a heaven to me.

This is one attraction of a certain kind of music to me.  Acoustic guitars, pianos drenched in reverb, a lone cello playing contrapuntal lines, dark and swelling pads playing minor key melodies in a slow and spacious environment create these images in my head as clearly as the words of the best writer.  For a late night city, there’s Lullaby by Blackfield, off of their first album, or Lilium Creuntus (Deus Nova) from Pain of Salvation’s Be. Seven Seconds by Echobrain (2004’s Glean) suggests sunset in early December, a farmland with the first dusting of the season. Heart Attack in a Lay-By from In Absentia reminds me so strongly of Christmas-time on a city street, stuck in traffic that moves like a child’s countdown to that magical morning.  Porcupine Tree has a million of them, actually: Oceans Have No Memory and In Formaldehyde from Recordings, and (maybe the best example of all — imagine a trainride through a lonely Russian countryside in the dead of January, midnight) Lazurus from Deadwing. Even Strapping Young Lad check in with Plyophony off of their upcoming The New Black.

Winter’s been on my mind a lot lately. One, the obvious, is that it’s summer in Alabama, with triple-digit temperatures being seen already, humidity that makes ocean dwellers happy.  My apartment, the upstairs part of a duplex, ovenlike.  Codename: Auschwitz (a bad joke to make when you have a shaved head and angular features and a cat named Adolf like I have, but when has that ever stopped me?).

But the other, the more important, is that life inside of my head feels cold.  Again, like last night, not as morbid as it sounds.  Cold is the state that slows down the physical forces in the world, turning gasses to liquids to solids.  The slower things move, the easier they are to grab, to hold on to, to put into their respective places.  Putting ice into a glass is infinitely easier than water.

Things feel like they are falling into place in my head, making more sense, giving me a moment of respite.

Winter is also when my heart feels the warmest, speaking nauseatingly metaphorically.  And if I look at things externally, purely on the surface, I see ahead of me another situation that I would be foolish to believe could ever stand a chance.  But this, then, is the cynical optimist: I expect the worst, but always, always, hold out hope for the best.

And even if it all falls through, yet again; whether I have finally found what I have looked for for so long, whether it’s an attainable (or is that obtainable?) treasure or another bomb to blow up in my face…

There’s still plenty of music to bring the cold weather to me.