Rule # 19 of Kerouac’s Advice to Writers

The good news: The red carpet looks at the BAFTA Awards were all fabulous. (My girl Demi, in particular, hit it out of the ballpark.)

The bad news: That storm was a MOTHERFUCKER.

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When temps finally rose above 25°, I trekked out to my car.

My car was completely encased in half an inch of extremely hard ice.

Now! I have dealt with crème brulée cars before. A thin layer of glaze over the accumulated snow!

But I actually needed a chisel to get this ice off, even with the car going and its heater turned up to 80°+. I actually broke off part of one of my windshield wipers.

And the entire driveway was one large ice skating rink. My car does not have front-wheel drive & gets no traction on ice. So, this was a dilemma.

I’d told Icky that he was gonna have to get someone over to plow—or rather to scrape—the driveway but, of course, there was radio silence from Icky.

Oh—and did I mention that Icky once again let the furnace run out of oil so that there is no heat in the house? And it’s a holiday weekend!

What would Pa Ingalls do? I wondered, channeling everybody’s favorite prairie patriarch.

And grimly, I began digging out the lower part of the driveway.

Figuring that if I parked my car near the fence, at least I’d be able to get out when I needed to. (Just how I was gonna trek down 40 yards of ice to get to the car was a matter I decided was best left to the morrow.)

Temps were forecast to hit 40° that afternoon before plummeting back down into the 20°s, so there was only a very narrow window of opportunity for digging out before the ice turned into something like concrete.

I say “digging,” but, of course, it was more like “prying”—the snow underneath the ice was melting, but the ice itself was holding strong, and I had to remove it using Icky’s plastic snow shovel—which simply wasn’t built for that purpose.

I did this for an hour and a half.

Finally, I created a kind of Northwest Passage that I sent a fervent prayer to the Universe would serve as some kind of way out.

And since the bottom of the driveway has piss-poor drainage and therefore a tendency to collect large pools of water, I salted the hell out of it. Twenty-five pounds of rock salt!

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As it turned out, I didn’t have to do any of this because after it got dark, Icky finally contacted the plow guy who cleared most of the driveway with his big antediluvian truck. (Those trucks lumbering around back country roads in high winter always remind me of armored dinosaurs somehow.)

Icky then testily texted—from fuckin’ Miami where he is attending some kind of Burning Man alumni event!—that I should spend tomorrow (that is today) salting the driveway.

I told him to hire one of the local neighbor boys & fuckin’ get the heating oil delivered.

Only I said it much more nicely than that because deep down inside, Icky knows he is a piece of shit & is therefore very, very sensitive to critical tones. The most effective way to deal with Icky is to shuffle & smirk: Yes, Massa Icky! No, Massa Icky!

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It’s always fuckin’ something.

You can’t even really get upset about it because what would be the point?

The ice-prying was good exercise since the gym yesterday was closed due to inclement weather.

And the Universe was actually very kind to me! Because shortly after I got back inside the house, I noticed my FitBit was not on my wrist.

I am rather obsessive about tracking exercise & sleep stats, so I became mildly frantic. Thought for a moment it had fallen off while I was prying ice, but no, I could still synch it—which meant that it had to be within 30 feet (and so inside the house.)

Uttered one last prayer to the Universe while remembering Rule # 19 of Kerouac’s Advice to Writers—Accept Loss Forever.

And then.

On automatic pilot, I rose & marched into a part of the house where I never, ever go. And there was the FitBit.

Très étrange…

Also, I had a very nice hour-and-a-half phone chat with John L______, which brought me back happy memories of Monterey.

And I watched the fabulous Shadow of the Vampire with Willem Dafoe in the evening. Pa Ingalls never got to watch Shadow of the Vampire!

So, you know. Not an altogether bad day. Just an unproductive day in terms of useful work.