Monday, December 31, 2012

"Happy New Year" from Super Metroids, Level 4, Land of Norfaire, Planet Zebes

December 31, 2012:  New Year's Eve Stop-Action Ice Art

The thing about our Family Holiday that struck me deeply this Christmas season – the thing many families were equally touched and awed by – was the epidemic of killer icicles that broke out Friday through New Year’s Eve.

Rogue, mutant icicles were apparently super-sized by temperature-fluctuations so vast, one minute our roofline burst forth with waterfalls and song, and the next, arctic gusts transformed them into stop-action ice art.

(These arctic gusts were similar to those Kurt Russell spat into in his arctic movie, The Thing, where airborne spittle got so brittle, it shattered in loud shards upon impact with tundra.)

By yesterday morning, every overhang on our house was adorned with morphing, stop-action ice spikes in various stages of birth and death.  It was like living inside The Science Channel.  Or the movie Inception, down in a Limbo Layer where twenty-four hours pass as slowly as one thousand years.

We were so busy from 10 PM on December 27th until roughly 59 hours later, working a variety of moments that morphed from protracted warmth to frozen stop-action, it was stunning to ride the layers back up to real-time last evening when I came face-to-spike with a Death-cicle at midnight.

It was dizzying. Although, it was difficult to discern from whence my vertigo derived, after a day of a different stop-action, caused by the car we were stunt-driving through Boston in.  (I think in a “cloverleaf” pattern.) 

The TomTom GPS we borrowed instructed us to “Turn around … as SOON … as possible.  Turn around … as SOON … as possible . . .” until all five of us were vomiting and my son proposed to his girlfriend so we could stop and visit wedding-reception venues that did not spin on their own.

Five of us ventured into the city.  Only three would return. (Our two missing passengers kept the TomTom with them to ensure their return to Canada.  Or Guam.  We'll see.)

So there the remaining three of us were at midnight last night, so bereft of a TomTom, we had no idea how to get from the parked car to our front door without guidance.  We clung to each other, disoriented from lack of direction, lurching like a six-legged epileptic ant, clawing at the door-handle with our thirty grappling-fingers.

“Finally,” I sighed through clenched teeth, arms wrapped around decorative woodwork surrounding a load-bearing column. "We're safe."  Which is when a killer icicle I’d not previously appreciated for its beauty or lethality snapped off the entry's overhang and slid neatly down my back.

What this season lacked in temporal-accuracy, it made up for in icicle carnage.  

The icicle I eventually retrieved from the base of my spine -- trapped by new Christmas leggings -- was the kind that only houses on Neptune can grow: Sabertooth Dagger Prong Dart-Shards From Space.

Today they are affixed like jaws of death to every possible form of egress, making entry and exit to our home impossible without chainmail and a Spartan Helmet.

This morning I learned that these sentry’d stalactites are identical to those encountered by Samus Aran in Super Metroids, Level Four, Land of Norfaire, Planet Zebes. 

You remember the story. 

Samus had just made her way to the research facility, only to find the building in ruins and the Metroid Larva nowhere to be found, when out of darkness came a group of Zebesian Space Pirates and their leader Ridley with Metroid Larva in tow, who – upon this chance encounter with Samus –fled swiftly to the rebuilt planet Zebes where Samus followed, resolving to finish them off and save the hatchling.

Our icicles were of the same treacherous strain Samus could only defeat with a Grappling Spazer, two Morphing Balls and Brinstar Spore Spawn.

Plus they far transcended the official icicle definition rendered by the World Home-Book of Cold.  Icicle: frozen ex-water drippage that transforms barren architectural awnings into delicate crystalline fringe.” --  See Doily, Vol. 6; Pg. 32

This hardly depicts the weaponry severing scalps outside my slider.

My 22 year old just snapped one off an awning outside her bedroom window.

She used a pulley system and a lasso.

She is now outside transporting it via snowshoes and electric toboggan to bury it in snow to keep it cold for tonight’s Anime New Year’s Eve Costume Party.

It is seven feet long and was snapped off midway between its dagger-tip and awning attachment-point.  Even at this halfway mark, its severed trunk measures two feet in diameter.  More than a half dozen little neighbor boys are asking her now if they can come over later to base-jump it.

She is explaining to them how she needs to keep it intact, so she can whomp it through gin-entranced guests this evening announcing, “Behold, I am Samus Aran. I bring you Isis, chopped by hatchet for our Brinstar Spawn-tinis.  All Hail Isis.”

Speaking of entranced, those little boys look positively enchanted out there now.   

Hmm.

Uh-oh.

It looks like Abby is dragging out plastic mailing-wrap from the Christmas trash.

Oh, will you look at that?

 She is rolling the boys in bubble wrap.  They look like blistered dwarves. 

Hang on.

[ABBY! Stop that. You’re Samus Aran, not Snow White And The Seven Burn Victims.]

Wait.  I get it.  She is dressing them up like Metroid Larva so they can transport Isis to the party, much in the way that Cleopatra was transported by Egyptian Elves.

[SLAVES, Mom, not Elves.]

I am not liking the way these icicles are shaping our New Year’s Eve. Excuse me while I venture out with protective fruit cake over my head to round up a girl posse and their Totally-Hair Barbies so we can Blow Dry this town’s awnings back to safety. 

Actually, if we dress up the blow dryers like little Grappling Spazers and Morphing Balls, I bet we can turn Abby’s Metroid Larva against her and make them our elven minions.

[Let that be a lesson to you, Samus Aran.  ZZZZAP!!   KerPLOW!!  ZOINK!  HAZZZAAAH!---]  

 -- ring --    

"Hello? We were just talking about you.  Did you guys make it back to Canada even close to on time AND on the right continent hey?  Mmm hmm.  I see, well great.  Happy New Year's Eve back and we'll talk on the New Year tomorrow!"

They made it back to Canada early due to the metric time up there. (Also because the TomTom was confiscated at Customs.)  And since ice does not stick to Toronto, they have no killer icicles up there, so I have to hurry up and post this, along with a photograph, so my family in Canada can know what's going on.

Happy New Year to All, and don't forget to take your morphing balls and blow your awnings for safety.  

Love, Carolyn