Friday, January 26, 2007

braving the bitter cold à vélo

biking in the frozen Northern wastelands
From BOS_webalbum

The lengths I go to to continue riding my bike in the awful awful Boston cold. I can feel the wind coming through my windows and causing my electric bill to grow. I do enjoy the fact that, via absurd amounts of clothing, I can deny the cold access to my skin and vital organs. Excuse me, (Mike), I can deny the lack of heat to access me. "Cold" is just a word. That brings me to my other point. I had a logico-linguistic revelation today. "Melt-phace," "Melt-phacing," "Melt-phacingly" and all the other conjugations, diminutions, etc. will incorporate easily into English. Firstly, like any well-behaved word, it has an opposite: "Freeze-phace." This was proved to me today whilst attempting an almost-melt-phacingly entertaining activity: skidding around on ice patches on my bike. The acceleration and uncertainty of the activity brought liminal melt-phacing-ness, but this entertainment was contradicted by the freeze-phacing-ness of the -15F wind chill, which literally froze my face. I think we can all agree that freeze facing is an unmistakeably bad thing. However, typical of American logic, the exception proves the rule: cryogenic freezing for the purpose of longevity is a pretty pleasant application of face freezing. On the flip side, while melt-phacing is without exception a positive, face melting is pretty definitively negative. The exception, once again proves the rule: the Buddhist monks who poured gas on themselves and literally melted their own faces were clearly hardcore and awesome. This brings up one last point. If freeze-phacing is negative and melt-phacing is positive, phace-sublimating must be worthy of describing something like Nirvana. This is a moot point. Since none of us will ever live to be phace-sublimated, we can only aspire to such an apex. We can only hope we will one day come across that booze, food, sex, spiritual transformation, music, etc. that rocks so much that it kills us on the spot, causing us to evaporate in the most Star-Trekkian manner.
In conclusion, melt-phacing has a contradiction, it contradicts itself to some extent, it has an almost arbitrary superior (phace-sublime), its meaning is ambiguous and has little to do with its origin, and it is spelled in the most awkward manner possible. I think that it is a prime candidate for word-ship, and I will be forwarding this post to Merriam Webster in petition for addition to the 2007 English Dictionary.
I'm sorry for wasting a good 3 minutes of your life, but I felt like writing that, so there it is. Don't hate me.

1 Comments:

Blogger wichtelwesen said...

freeze-phaceing is a well-known phenomenon to me, usually occuring after getting off the big lift when skiing. i use the same sort of ninja garb (sans helmet) to prevent it. bikes on ice do = meltphacing

27/1/07 07:45  

Post a Comment

<< Home