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Freezer Burn
Gotta hate when freezer burn strikes. Whether it’s the food in your freezer, the snow in your yard or the notions in your brain, freeze and refreeze is a Hump 🐫 Day to get over…
🧊🥶🧊 Refreeze 🧊🥶🧊
There was a time when people said, ‘Jim, if you keep on making faces, your face will freeze like that.’ Now they just say, ‘Pay him!’ ~Jim Carrey
There was a topic that came up in a meeting recently that reminded me of an incident a few years ago.
We’re in that weird time of year when it’s trying to decide if it’s listening to the groundhog or not.
It’s cold and it snows. It gets warm and some of it thaws.
It gets cold again, and whatever is left becomes a yard glacier.
We all know this pattern up north.
The incident I’m thinking of wasn’t even the overnight deal.
There was a massive snowfall and we were all knee and hip deep in snow.
It was borderline warm when the snow fell.
It was right at the top of the temperature threshold for snow to be possible.
The normal order of business is that the afternoon warms up and the snow begins to melt away.
Well, kinda.
Like I said, knee or even hip-deep snow and the core was slushifying.
The overall mass of snow looked about the same, or maybe a bit moist on top.
Then the temperature shifted from almost-warm to 🥶🤬🥶🤬🥶 in rather short order.
If you hadn’t shovelled out, you were 💩 outta luck.
Shovels were over. You needed a pickaxe to get your car out. No ifs, ands or buts about it.
Full on yard glaciers.
Again, if you had a moment to shovel while the snow was damp and settling, great. You had an ice palace with pathways.
If you treated it like any typical northern snow event, you were entirely glaciated.
Gotta hate when that happens…
🧊 Oops 🔥
What is Freezer Burn?
Pretty much hate when this happens, too.
It’s one of those “ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” situations.
Is it terrible? Well, it’s better than not having food at all, but damaged food is suboptimal.
Here’s some advice on how to seal your food up properly for longer storage in the freezer.
How to Package Meat for the Freezer
🌬️❄️ Thaw 🌞💧
We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience. ~Joan Didion
People can’t help trying to overlay narrative on randomonium.
It’s the reason mythology is often so weird.
People with a small part of the picture try to explain the corner that they can see as if it is completely systemic.
It usually isn’t.
Life is often weirder than can be accommodated by a straighforward narrative plot.
It’s why I tend to eschew the concept of plot in my work.
Plot assumes you can maintain narrative control of your story.
If you’ve got a little prose nugget, I guess that’s the case.
If you’ve climbed the sides of Freytag’s Pyramid and sculpted your narrative to conform to that shape, great. Whatever.
It’s what our English teachers and professors taught us, so we consider it correct.
Certainly, it works. You absolutely can bake that gingerbread house and it will probably even taste good.
For me, life is bigger than formats and formulas.
I lean into verisimilitude.
I don’t want people to look at my characters and see someone who is narratively contrived, convenient or conventional.
I want people to see a simulation of life.
I want people to have the feeling that they’re watching somebody’s life.
I’m not going to judge people who prefer to work in those forms.
It does work. I won’t say it doesn’t.
It just doesn’t work for me.
That’s all for today. See you back on Saturday for crust…