People of Portland, To Arms!

January 3rd, 2009

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It was a week that will live in infamy.  It was a ceaseless attack, a vicious assault on the good people of the Northwest, one which will leave us with physical and psychological scars for years to come.  There was an impending sense of panic that was slowly ebbing its way into our minds and souls, but none of us could prepare for the horror heading our way.  Homeland Security must be mobilized, this attack cannot go unanswered!

The achromatic killer was waiting for us all, playing on our worst fears and turning us against each other.  Or so it felt as the weather witches began predicting little white flakes of powdery death to begin falling from the sky, blitzkrieg style sometime in the coming week.  Prepare now!  Buy water!  Buy batteries!  Make sure the pets are safely tucked inside!  They were predicting up to half an inch of white kill-water!  Half.  An.  Inch.  Run for your lives!

For those cursed to live elsewhere, Portland and the Northwest in general, have a mostly temperate climate, excluding the higher elevations.  It rains frequently and consistently, but the temperature rarely falls below freezing.  But on the few occasions that it does and the white pellets of hate descend, anything over an inch to two inches can lay the Portland metropolitan area and its roughly 2 million inhabitants inert.  The city will essentially shut down, the streets will empty, and the gears of the city will grind to a stop.  And like the witches predicted, the enemy attacked, screaming over an inch and a half of pure malice upon us.

The end was nigh.  A blanket of death crept from the heavens to judge us all, and those with heat and ample provisions gazed down on us like the Rapture had claimed them, and only us sinners were left to remain out in the cold.  It began dropping doom on us early in the morning, and the first casualty was the color.  The bastards stole all the color from the world and replaced it with white.  Within three hours we might have even had a quarter inch of snow.  Thankfully there were no reported fatalities.

Needless to say, the proverbial shit hit the fan and people freaked out.  The city shut down, and the voodoo people on the idiot box screamed mortal warnings of doom for anyone foolish enough to go outside.  Yahoo weather called it simply “light snow”, but we knew the truth.  Oh yes, we knew…
After a few days of living like animals under a blanket of snow, there were shockingly no casualties to report.  Unless of course the snow swallowed them.  The streets were beginning to carry those with adventurous spirits, despite the closing of most schools and many businesses.  Supermarkets began to fill again, and bars surrounding the closed businesses were filled with those needing a drink with a side of irony.

When the city began to move again, many returned to their routines.  Those of us that made it back to our jobs were able to see the sparks of life return to the city.  There was still the occasional Hollywood style explosion when cars collided, or at least that is the impression the television gave us, but life returned to normal and we all breathed a sigh of relief.

We had received less than two inches of snow, the city shut down for two days, but life was returning and we had weathered the storm.  We laughed, we chuckled, we moved on and enjoyed the time we took off of work.  It was a break, a vacation for many of us.

And then it snowed a foot.  A goddamn foot in a city that was crippled by two inches.

A week after our defenses had been tested, the true enemy emerged.  A foot of snow, weather’s equivalent to a chemical attack.  The serrin gas of the precipitation world.  It kept coming, the kill water.  More and more.  As the sixth inch began to accumulate it became more and more obvious that not all of us would be making it out alive.  With the growing accumulation of frozen hate on the ground, it was time to call our families and say goodbye.  A Viking funeral is the only way to go in situations like this.  And may God forgive those of us that survive, for what we have to do.  Like TS Elliot said, this is the way the world end, not with a bang but a whimper.

Thankfully many of us stocked up like it was Y2K all over again.  Those that didn’t, began looking at their roommates or neighbors like one starving loony toons character sees another in the visage of a giant turkey leg.  Not a good way to go, but when under attack from faceless, merciless enemy, survival is not an easy game.

It is a week that will be remembered for decades to come.  The dead will be mourned as victims, despite what the so called “doctors and nurses” say about it just having been their time to go.  We know the truth.  Like any well planned attack, transportation was the first to be crippled.  The airport closed and streets were blocked to all of us, even those brave enough to own a giant SUV in the homeland of the eco-crazy.

When you scare a deer, the deer will usually startle for a moment, then run.  But when the trauma coming towards the same deer is so intense, the deer will stand still from the sheer terror of what is coming, and it will then make a tasty- but gamey- delicacy.  Needless to say, where an inch and a half to two inches of snow can cripple a city, a foot will bring it to new levels of fear.  Apocalypse now.  But cold.

There is only one possible reaction to this, we need to launch a pre-emptive strike against the Earth.  Portland simply cannot survive another unprovoked attack of this scale, we need to strike first.  It won’t be easy, and the cost will be dear, but with a resolute will and a steely determination, we can succeed.  If only George Bush could have won a third term.  He has the right type of experience for a mission of this sort.

Until that day of our righteous crusade comes, we Portlanders…Portlandians…Portlandaneese… will brace and do our duty.  We will not go quietly into that snowy goodnight, we will rage against nature until the coming dawn.  The warmth of the Spring sun charge like cavalry in only a few months, we can hold the line.  Now we must research.  After all, how hard can it be to make a flamethrower at home?