inverted Utah

January is really great. I mean the best holiday of the year is in January - namely my birthday (that's on the 23rd for anyone who hasn't bought my gift yet). I can be tough about sending sprays of ice all over my hands in the morning to see out my windshield. I can talk myself out of a depressive state when I get less than 9 hours a day of sunlight. And since high school, I have even learn how to swallow my pride and run around in spandex pants, even if it means scadalizing all those who are pruddish enough in this town to wear shorts on top

Now a brief word on wearing shorts on top of spandex pants. If that is you, consider the alternative. I plead with you. It will make the rest of us look so much less disreputable and you less chafed if we were all in this together.

But back to what I cannot tough out, talk myself out of, or swallow. I dread the imminent Utah valley-anywhere inversion. It is so brutal. Not even the southern happy valley where Provo stands can avoid it. I have already heard of the "the red alert" day announcements in Salt Lake. It is slowly thickening and spreading southward until it will finally choke me with shrapnel swirling with exhaust from soccer moms' Hummers and the ghosts of Geneva Steel. There is no avoiding it. It will find me. It will force me into recreation centers with crying babies where I will have watch The Rosie O'Donell show or the Country Music Awards instead of watching trees go by. Or worse it will slowly lead me, in desparation, to gigantic gym chains with men in circus pants flexing in the mirrors that surround me and I will run, run, run and go nowhere at all. Nowhere at all for 2 months.