Random late night thoughts in a blizzard

It's been snowing here for approximately thirty days and thirty nights. The winds howls. The glacier that was once a street growls. In another week or so I'll start rounding up two of every creature in the neighborhood. After that, I'll probably start eating them.
It's a little known fact that the Eskimos are the most paradoxical people on earth. For example, an Eskimo will say something like, "It's so cold in here I'm sweating to death." Or, "I love the polar bear like a brother, sometimes like a wife. This is particularly true when I hunt and kill polar bears." One might conclude that Eskimos lack logic, but that would be missing the point. Eskimos view the world as a totality; every single thing is more or less the same one thing, and yet, pardoxically, there is a nearly infinite number of ways to express it. Which may explain why the Eskimo is notoriously taciturn.. At the same time, I know virtually nothing about Eskimos. Are there still Eskimos out there? If there's a good (and at the same time bad) Eskimo out there, I could sure use one tonight.
Another little known fact is that Fairbanks, Alaska is, on average, the coldest city on the planet. The name Fairbanks is actually a loose transliteration of an Eskimo sound uttered in moments of abysmal joy, literally translated as "The worst best heaven in hell, where you will live long, die young and have the skin of a beauty queen resembling a walrus."
Hey, who wouldn't want to live there?
But getting back to my own extreme weather, the nicely horrible thing about snowstorms is that not only do they erase the landscape, turning the tediously familiar into an unknown zone of impossible to realize potential with neither a history nor a future, they also affect short term memory in humans and to a somewhat lesser degree in animals, and can under certain unimaginable circumstances cause delusional behavior. Yesterday, for example, I hiked out to the local trading post for supplies. First thing I noticed was that all the vegetables - which by the way all looked the same, as if every vegetable had somehow mutated back into its prototypical, Ur-vegetable form - were watching me. The same applied to the meager selection of fruits. Not only watching me, but also, I suspected, coming to some conclusion about me. Needless to say, I did not venture into the fish section. I walked over to the shop owner, under normal conditions a burly, mean-looking Japanese named Takahashi, whom on this day, for reasons which remain a mystery, I addressed as Mamoud the Merciless.
Tell me, Mamoud the Merciless, I said to him. What's the story on the fucking produce?
Mamoud visibly tensed, twisted his head in the direction of the hypothetically rising sun and mumbled something to the spirits he assumes are responsible for keeping him thus far out of a lunatic asylum, no doubt asking them to either make me disappear, or burst into flames. As neither occured, he looked back at me, grimaced and said, You fuck it, you buy it.
Meanwhile, who would have guessed that Mamoud, aka Takahashi the greengrocer, even knew the fuck word?
And why would he assume that even I, a foreigner with the demeanor of a blue-eyed Antichrist and a penchant for ironic asides, would want to have sex with his vegetables?
Let me put it this way, Mamoud, I told him. My present feelings are so much the antithesis of anything that could even remotely be described as erotic that even if your gorgeous daughter, Sheena of the Desert, appeared at this moment wearing nothing but the flimsiest of semi-transparent kimono made from imported Chinese rice paper and engaged me in explicit sexual repartee while suggestively stroking one of your ridiculously overpriced bananas, I would be hard pressed to get from the state of terror I am currently in as a result of being singled out and probably plotted against by your produce to a place where I could respond appropriately to her advances.
Yes, I don't see, he said. And who is this Sheena you speak so fondly of?
Exactly what I'm talking about, I yelled back. You're dull, demented and overworked. You don't even know your own daughter. You couldn't pick your wife out of a line up. For all I know, she's hanging back there in the meat locker. When your son gets out of prison, you'll ignore him too.
So you want vegetables, right?
I'm guessing that listening to your customers is not a big priority for you.
If any of this was really happening, it might be.
A good point. Score one for Mamoud.

But getting back to my original thought, which I seem to have forgotten....

I left the shop with a new bottle of sunscreen and a brand of cigarettes I never smoke. Then I couldn't remember where I lived. I knew and I didn't know. I knew everything I needed to know, while at the same time knowing that there was nothing I knew that could possibly be worth knowing. A sorry state, to be sure. Like an Eskimo with amnesia. A somnambulist on Saturn. An Alzheimers victim in Antarctica. I understood in this moment, wrapped in a blizzard, as lost as the ancient key to the alchemist's book of dreams, that it's only the fragments of our experience which are relevant. We like to assume an intelligible wholeness for convenience sake, but by doing so we miss the seemingly insignificant pieces which are the true source of inspiration.
Hence the high degree of disillusionment, not to mention schizophrenia, among Rationalists and, sadly, Eskimos.

When I finally made it home, I found the dog sitting in the car with the engine running. How she managed this is anyone's guess, but I'm assuming that at the same time she was forgetting who and what she is, she began thinking that she might be me. Not that I minded. I often wish there was someone else who could be me, if only for awhile. Anyway, I gave her the pack of cigarettes I'd bought and we both went inside to have a drink.

As they say in Fairbanks: In the winter, none of us start drinking until the sun goes down. (think about it)

To quote Neil Young: When the change came, I held my breath with my eyes closed.

And Charles Bukowski: It's better to be an asshole than to smell like one.


Thanks to all of you who have wasted your time writing comments. It's very much appreciated.