Seattle's meteorology community is giddy with a Friday that it promises will be sunny and even 60 degrees. This is our bobbing world. It went up; now it is going down. The darkest months of 2023 are, for sure, here with us, but only as a memory; and memory is how the mind (through biological processes that are, when explained in scientific terms, bewildering) makes what has happened present with what is happening. Those long and dark days. How I will miss you. Tomorrow sounds like it will be the gateway to a wilderness of over-long days, high temperatures, and a flexing sun that kicks sand in my face like a beach bully full of muscles.  

In the winter, it's my habit, during the long, long nights, to open my bedroom window and welcome in the cold. I then run the fan, jump into my freezing bed, pull the duvet up to my chin, and find myself in an arctic world. Nothing warm but my body, and even barely so. The light of the moon as frozen as that of the stars. Their heat will never reach me. And the wind coming from the rotating fan doesn't whir but, in my dream-dissolving mind, howls. How happy (at peace) I am in this simulacrum of the South Pole, or even the poles of Mars, a planet whose sun is so small and bleak.

The frigid magic of the moment was always fulfilled by the deep doom jazz of the Nordrhein-Westfalen band Bohren & der Club of Gore, particularly their 2014 masterpiece Piano Nights. Listen to it. It's like my room during the winter nights that are, presumably, meeting their end tomorrow. Nothing in this jazz but the kind of ghosts you find in Truly, Madly, Deeply—their barely warm breath condensing to icy droplets. I will wait and wait for winter 2023.