it's raining outside and it's obliterating all the beauty the snow had wrought. Snow, when looking at rain, is clearly an amazing thing. Getting pelted by rain and soaked to my bones reminds you of how fast and simplemindedly it gets to the ground. It's a sort of rain that constitutes the apocryphal Chinese water torture. Rain just drips, it's pleasant patter is really like the relentless chewing of a beaver through a tree, it breaks things down and seeks the lowest point. Rain would probably be happiest if it could just keep falling, if it could mindlessly follow gravity into an infinite, galactic hole.

Snow is not like rain, snow is alive and diversionary. Descartes said that intelligence is in detours, and rain is as stupid as snow is brilliant. Snow hardly even falls from the sky, it floats. If you watch a flake, a flocon, as i learned earlier today, it falls no more reliably than a swooping bird. It is leisurely, carried by the wind. Snow is delicate enough to land on your nose or the tip of your tongue. Snow is balletic and lacey and distractable. It is also constructive. When snow does fall it piles up with the same genius with which termites build those gigantic nests. They know how to fall on each other, they have a collective intelligence each flake is much too flakey to have alone. The soft curves of snowbanks are magical accumulations, they follow the contours of a tree branch or a garbage back and in so doing underline the whole physical landscape, or outline, depending on how you think about it. everything is special when its shape is replicated by immaculate snow.

and so it's awful when rain pelts those drifts, leaving them scarred like a face with bad acne.
apparently rain isn't even an artful, bullet shape, raindrops really look like miniature hamburger buns, a clunkiness equal to their doings.

snow is perched delicately, it's in moving it that it becomes regular old water.

also,

Yet, it was beautiful, a single ugly form is ugly, but if it’s replicated, or spectacularly enlarged it becomes something to reckon with. If the dirty wrinkles of a garbage bag were enlarged to be the size of a mountain they would command your awe, in the same way that if you shrunk a mountain to the size of a soup can it might just look like a large turd.


snow is as hardy as a mountain climbers fingers. earlier this morning i walked past an old church that's been converted into apartments. but it still has the old, heavy building blocks that protrude out in the middle of them. they aren't flat like bricks, they have extruding, natural bits. and the snow is perched on any of the most meagerly graspable bits.