stripped-down engine

no matter how much or unshakable the vagabond reasons may be, it's still so painfully difficult to take off one's clothes.

i see all these people walking the streets, still wearing thick fleecy things. or, if their arms are exposed in all their hideous pallor, then they scurry along even more furtively. and i say this only because i am, beyond doubt or shame, one of these.

to be fair, a lot of this could be a simple result of the fact that a scant week ago i was using a space-heater that whirred scrawnily into the night and, really, there's no way to say for certain that i won't do so again next week.

but i'm not advocating a final day of judgment in the form of Washing the Winter Coat and packing away all the bulky clothing. i'm talking about being willing to forego the pleasure of slow suffocation by sweatshirt, about wearing a t-shirt and not fretting about it.

when i make the outrageous claim that this type of thing (the seemingly senseless suffering that is, of course, both chosen and supported/able) happens more here, in the context of the University of Chicago, i (hope i) do so without a lot of the self-gratifying meta-irony of self-definition involving many many Wailing Deaths of Fun and Forgotten Levels of Hell.

the issue seems to be about that which is "unnatural." and, clearly, there is a lot that is, in one way or another, quite unnatural about the particular sort of people who populate this place. that is a fact: it is counterproductive either to glory in it or denigrate it. but, as opposed to, say, what would be the autumnal inverse of the phenomenon in question (wherein people keel over with frostbite on either side of 57th street because they either refuse or are unaware of the need to be properly dressed for suddenly colder conditions), the taking off of the clothes seems particularly informative.

as the wise woman (who bore me and has never bored me since) has always maintained: "it's easier to put on clothing than take it off." which is exactly true. especially when little crises of existence come into the equation.

because that's really what it's about: the rampant uncertainty running around, unheeded and without heed. unpredictable fluctuations of the weather are particularly offensive to those who fancy they can understand most of their world through sheer exertion. in the end, the only thing to do to protect oneself against the possibility of a storm or reel of temperature is to stay covered up. it's a marvel that there are not more fixed-open umbrellas above our heads.