NO!

I scream so that others may look into the dark, dusty corners beyond the Pepsi machine and desire that I might STFU.

Actually, the title is a play on my son's response to looking out the window and seeing everything obscured to a fat outline by a hefty snowfall. "No!" the inhibited, clipped, frozen nostril cadence of a Mini so Ton, the economy of air at the expense of syllables, dropping the 's' in favor of breathing or just being four.

Lots of no where I was at tonight. Sopping fat flakes of October thrown down immediately in a big whump of a storm. After I got home, I noticed my jeans were wet to mid-calf. I was lucky; my jeans could have been a lot more soaked.

The pass I drive down every night is a deep canyon cleaved by a small stream, deeply graded towards the negative, almost impenetrable by light even on nights with a full moon at its apex, all headlights and curves and tree trunks and hoping there’s no suicidal deer eager to stick its head through a windshield. Tonight the added attraction included mounds of wet snow thrown up by tires ahead all night, turned to ice.

Oh, but wait. Not only did I get mounds and pools of death but Colorado also offers this: twits who view inclement weather and dangerous conditions as a good reason to drive badly at twice the speed. Not only do these drivers find themselves in a spin directly in front of me but they ALSO give me a stupid look as you pass them by while they sit stuck in a ditch! In other worlds, you’d make $90k, $100k, $125 - $300k – to deal with this shit but in this special “real world” offer, it’s done for eight-fifty an hour. EIGHT FUCKING FIFTY AN HOUR.

Yet, my jeans were not that wet. Usually, the wreck in the ditch was some big dumbfuck in a big dumb truck, a smashed out grill grinning imbecilicaly into the chill, steam rising like a thought balloon saying “Doh!” Driving my beater down the pass with care (because the slightest ding would be catastrophic at eight fucking – yeah, you SEE), I passed some obscenely large pickups that had moments earlier gone barreling by like some drunken, rolling turd looking for a place to sink. Yee haw motherfucker, you may have had a good car but I’ll always have good karma. Laugh, laugh laugh, laugh, laugh laugh laugh laugh.

My grandmother used to say that laughter dried up tears but she was crazier than a shithouse rat. Not that I’d shed any tears for the chumps in the ditch and their crumpled lumps of tin on which they’d botched their credit. Nor had I laughed at their misfortune. Indeed, I hadn’t even considered that the morons stuck miserably in the snow probably made much more money than me. Any tee-hee from me was purely my sense that I’d soon be home in fresh, warm jeans and writing this wickedly, grill still intact, grinning like a chump at home while some dumbass stands freezing in the no, explaining to some state trooper how this, uh, came down.

Sitting here, looking out my window, I could say no. Nancy Reagan wanted me to. But, no, it’s been said, right at this window, by sweeter lips than mine.