WINTER LESSONS
STIMULANT WEEKLY NEWSLETTER 024 // DECember 21, 2024
In winter, I learned about grown-ups.
The first lesson I learned was of their dim-witted cruelty, always intended as an act of public service but, in the most grown-up kind of way, mutated to become its own grotesque opposite.
In winter, we were forced to recess in the frigid outdoors, trundling through thick snow and breathing on our hands if we forgot our mittens. I don’t know whose pom-pommed head got the idea first, but a novel invention was gripping the spirit of our frostbitten schoolyard, a new system of warmth that depended on careful organization and ranks. We quickly disposed of our sybarite chatter and, in the words of many a tutor and teacher, got to work.
We recessed in and around an enormous wooden play structure, fitted with see-sawing staircases and fire poles and all sorts of other siege defence mechanisms. Somewhere under this elephant fortress was a small nook, where five of us could fit and fifteen of us could squeeze. The nook was in sight of our school’s boiler room, which was connected to the old boy’s bathroom. Inside, a high-pressure 1930’s faucet shot hot water that more resembled ignited jet-fuel. It was integral to our project. The door kept ajar with a small rock, one thermos bearer after another ventured in, beyond the sweaty boiler room, and towards that sink—he’d emerge with pitcher full of steaming elixir and pour it into the pit of wood chips in the centre of our crowded nook. The small space trapped the steam, and we basked in the vaporous wood musk— our little cloud of golden warmth in the winter.
Of course it wouldn’t last. When children assemble ranks and create something earnest, its integrity, importance, and legitimacy is always—and this is with absolutely no exceptions—swept to the side by grown-ups, so that their rules may be enforced.
One day, chattering in the snow as we lined up outside the nook, our finest thermos-bearer trudged back from his quest to the faucet with a sorry face and an empty bottle. The bastards had locked the boiler room. And when he had tried the long way around, through the front-facing hallway, a grown-up adjunct—what they called a “hall monitor”—had issued him a warning and threatened to confiscate his thermos if he was caught breaking our compulsory outdoor time again. All hopes of our outdoor warmth disappeared at that moment, and our daily ranks evaporated, all because of one locked door.
***
In winter, I became obsessed with death.
Bored and purposeless without our steam system or snowball fights—another victim of a growing rulebook—our brigade took to snow-angels and gossip, but also to crueller, slyer sports, and one day I bore witness to a small, patchy squirrel dying on the snowy pavement. Underbite had nailed it with a fist-sized rock only seconds after saying, “Watch this,” to Judy. Much to Underbite’s frustration, Judy shrieked and ran away, and stumbling onto this scene I stood next to the confused murderer and looked at the heap in the cold. Before a grown-up could arrive, the patchy squirrel, twitching in the blood-damp snow, did its impish little death rattle, then did no more. An obsessive secret anxiety consumed me on the spot.
That night sleep came too slow, and I rocked side to side in a black delirium. The ocean of living that stretched ahead of me seemed to shrink and shrink until it could fit in bed right next to me. I called out for my parents and told them that I didn’t want to die.
But that was life for a week—the days got colder and brittler, and the deep leather 4:30 sunsets sank into morbid bedtime where dying squirrels twitched a dance across my imagination. The sheep I counted were gored by angry butchers, every car I heard driving by outside was headed towards a crash, and without fail I’d end up in that same panicked sweat I’d come to know as my nightly visitor. I didn’t want to die.
Resent their cheerful lack of imagination as I did, I had to wonder with amazement how grown-ups managed to go to sleep so easily—“like a log,” my father would say, or “like a baby.” I yearned to know their secret, their amazing plan enacted on a nightly basis against the looming spectre of expiration. But every time I asked my mother or father for answers during my seizures of doom, they only gave me treacly responses: “It’s in a long, long time, longer than you can imagine.” I could and did imagine. I began to tire of their withholding, their cheap tricks, and their unbelievably patronizing lies. “With the rate that technology is progressing, by the time you’re one-hundred you’ll probably be able to upload your brain to a computer,” my father would say.
My parents loved to have dinner parties. On these nights our living room filled with relatives and family friends and a terrible number of Blundstones by the door, and in the careful absence of any other children, I tiptoed across a threshold into an adult world and adeptly mingled.
They loved me. They loved how I mixed their cocktails and placed them on coasters. They loved my button-down plaid. They loved how I used phrases like “may I please.” They loved all these indicators of secret allegiance and more, and I gobbled up their attention. I wanted nothing more than to be precious, well-spoken, and really quite adult-like. I carried out my waiter duties with great zeal, observing a world of drinking and smoking and mediocrity. Betraying my better judgment in those moments, I couldn’t help but feel a creeping jealousy. I was glad none of my schoolyard comrades were there to see me.
By 10 p.m., the grown-ups would finally intervene and pluck me from the living room for bedtime. I’d slowly drag my feet upstairs, do my nightly diligence, and change into cursed pyjamas before pulling the sheets over me. On these nights, I curled up in a fetal gesture and expected some deathly anxiety to creep, but none did. Something about my evening had acted as a perfect disruption, and I usually fell asleep after only a few moments of gleeful meditation. I rode the hot wind of voices—muffled from beneath the wooden floorboards—silverware still scraping plates, and glasses clinking. It was more than enough that they kept going and I faded away.
WINTER LESSONS was edited by Kat Mulligan.
STATE OF STIMULANT
The TWSY launches were an insane success. Again, thank you to everyone who turned out in both Montreal and Sweden. Stimulant 2025 will be even bigger. Stay tuned.
Stimulant 2025:
Stimulant Writers’ Workshop, January 7 @ Cafe Nocturne.
Music / Readings event, January 24 @ La Sotterenea.
“This Will Save You” reprint ????, January something.
“Stimulant Volume Two”, March-ish.
More weekly newsletters, weekly.
Johnny Carter play………
No “Maxwell Norman’s Album of the Week” again this week. They are on a mysterious and charming hiatus.
Also, I know we said there would be a “Get Hip” this week last week, but… Next week!
Godbless and I love you!
Charlie Zacks