grey gazing

Sitting in traffic, my thoughts drift along with the clouds of vapor belching from the slowly moving cars ahead. Like a funeral procession for snails we creep along the frozen tarmac coloured a dirty white from the salt and drifting snow.

What's the difference between partly cloudy with sunny periods and partly sunny with cloudy periods? The world around me is reduced to monotones of greys and whites. Even the evergreens, cloaked in snow have taken on a grey-green tint for which Debbie Travis must have a creative name for.

I would like to be a meteorologist. I'd like to throw weather darts against a weather dart board and fuck up the day of the general paying public. That's how it's done isn't it?

Deep within the bowels of some indistinct building, Larry passes through two separate security doors. The steel doors hiss open and close with a small puff of wind with each swipe of his electronic pass. He is carrying a precious load balanced precariously on a precisely engineered tray. There is still a long sterile corridor through which he must walk down. His footsteps echo and crack against the glossy walls. His destination is one last door ahead of him looming larger with each hurried step. Fluorescent tubes crackle and hum above. His mission is almost over. Just one more swipe of his card. The Card.

Larry bares his Card with pride and determination. It took him years of peddling and pandering to fat men in starched Moore's suits and thin-lipped women dressed in black slacks and suit jackets

(Fairweather's, 40% off)

to get this point. He carries this Card around his neck like a rosary. Stroking it several times a day in a mantra of self-admiration and gratification.

The last door swished open with the same hiss of pneumatic jacks and well oiled gears as the previous entryways. He blinks to adjust his eyes to the muted glow of the large almost barren room.

Heads turn toward Larry and voices erupt in a symphony of praise and joy

"Hey, coffee's here"

"Man, that took you long enough"

"Did they have chocolate glaze?"

"Damn! I love the smell of Timmies in the morning"

Larry beamed. A smile as wide as his chubby cheeks would allow made his face glow with happiness. One of them approached him to take the precious cargo off his hands. Fred was like that. An endearing man with an unassuming face, his hair had long abandoned him for the deep recesses of the bathtub drain. But he wore the remaining strands like streamers at a birthday party. With a little effort, the dark strips contrasted well against his shiny pate like an abstract painting. He held before him a pointed object, sharply tipped on one end and feathered on the other. It was a dart. Not just any dart. The Dart.

"Here you go Larry. You know what to do".

Yes of course Larry knew what to do. Today, Wednesday, just like every other Wednesday for the past seven years, it was his turn to throw The Dart against the Weather Board. It was his turn to make sure that this small light weight object, flew from his fingers with precision that belied the weight of the world in it's missile-like shape. It was time to predict the weather.

Larry took a deep breath as a chorus of angels erupted inside his head. Mozart's Ave verum corpus in Technicolor-colour. Larry approached The Board...