Partly cloudy: A column about the weather
Part one: sex? No thanks; also, will global warming kill small-talk
EVAN JOHNSON, STAFF
Until recently, these pages were home to the Manitoban’s popular sex column "Befuckled," written by the paper’s former culture editor. I was extremely fond of that column, but it seemed to me an overwhelmingly bad idea to continue writing it myself. Sex, with its mysterious viscous secretions, fleshy droopings and luridly undulating torsos, is a very difficult subject to write about. If I tried my hand at the sex column, one of two very different things would happen:
1. I would take all the fun out of sex and the column would be rife with sly moral rebukes and ill-informed calls to repression. Tonally, it would resemble this quote from You’re Nearly There: Christian Sex Education for Ten-to-Teens by Mary Kehle: "To spend many minutes alone each day just thinking about sex will surely take away from a boy’s time which could be spent at more fun and rewarding things like sports, crafts, time with friends, wholesome reading, special projects, etc."
2. Trying desperately to make my column sound sexily eloquent, I would instead make it sound awkward and revolting. I would use adjectives like "throbbing" and "muculent"; and fruit-based similes —"thick, like nectar" or "clammy and yielding, like the inside of a boiled Red Ceylon peach."
In either case, the column would taint the act, especially for anyone who has seen my pale, spotted flesh.
The weather, so went my thinking, is the perfect topic to replace sex. First of all, replacing a sex column with a weather column seemed like a funny, clever idea. "What a funny, clever writer," I imagined people saying.
Second, it seemed like a much more manageable topic. Sex has a rather grand history of iniquity and an extraordinarily broad range of focus, and I know nothing of its interesting, tantalizing fringes, more’s the pity. The weather, I concluded, is well within the reach of my powerful journalistic grasp; a small topic, though its raw materials be large. It is, as journalist Jay Rosen has written "a world in which all human motives have been banned, where there is no history or politics, no power except that exercised by nature on all creatures at once."
It is this quality that makes the weather a suitable subject for "small-talk," that idle discourse noted and prized for its lack of weight or controversy. Other topics continually fail to achieve the weather’s effortless levity: sports is too specialized; politics, too divisive; sex is too titillating; work, too stressful; dinosaurs once seemed perfect, when I was 11 and Jurassic Park had just come out, but it was just a fad. No, if you want to reveal nothing of yourself in conversation, it’s got to be about the weather.
But there’s trouble on the horizon. Global warming, with its undertones of cataclysmic dread and its shame-inducing implications, is the anti-small-talk. Nothing hoovers up the airy pleasantries of a conversation like the suggestion that we’re all going to die and it’s your fault. Eager for some professional perspective, I asked long-time CTV weather anchor Sylvia Kuzyk if the weather had become a "heavier" topic lately. "In virtually every city across North America, the No. 1 reason people watch newscasts is to get weather information," she said.
At first, I was worried that this was just Sylvia tootin’ her own horn, like when I tell people that the No. 1 reason people read newspapers is for the witty, urbane commentary of Evan Johnson. Then I realized that implicit in this horn tootin’ was a subtle denial of my suggestion that the weather has ever been anything but a heavy topic. I had perceived it as small only because the conveniences of modern living have reduced its capacity to generate significant problems for me; in short, because I’m a short-sighted and undeservedly privileged scamp.
"I’ve learned that weather is never an absolute," said Kuzyk. "What’s beautiful to some is terrible for others. Farmers, for example, suffer during hot, dry spells and forest fire fighters often rejoice when there’s a downpour."
This is why the weather can function as a "safe" topic for small talk only when those engaging with it are on equal or similar material footing. One sunny day, for example, as I passed a sitting homeless man, he casually remarked, "Beautiful weather, eh?" "Actually, I enjoy the rain," I responded, confident that my banter was friendly and innocuous. "Yeah, well, you have a home," was his reply. I gave him a nickel, to help redress the imbalance.
On that note, there is a cruel and karma-refuting irony in the fact that the primary instigators of climate change (and habitat destruction, for that matter) — wealthy corporate barons; industrialized nations and their privileged citizens — will likely end up being the ones most equipped to sidestep its catastrophic effects. Not to put too fine a point on it: structurally speaking, the headquarters of Monsanto (which I envision as strongly resembling Castle Greyskull) will fare better than most self-sufficient communal villages.
I used to take solace in the entirely baseless dream that global warming would magically transform Winnipeg’s climate into some kind of tropical paradise and that Torontonians would, by the thousands, board buses and planes, ruefully shaking their heads, muttering under their breath. "Winnipeg was better all along!" they would reflect, as they bid goodbye to their city’s smoggy bombast. But there’s something sad about my dream. It implies that the only way to improve Winnipeg is to sit around, waiting for other, better cities to annihilate themselves. There’s got to be a better way, but with the city’s current mayoral administration the outlook is best, partly cloudy.
