winter

John Brownlee here, yet again breaking the fourth wall and slipping out of the Consumerist’s royal ‘we.’ When I was growing up, I lived on a precipitous street — in Massachusetts’ cruel winters, a shimmering slope of ice terminating in the child-chewing combine of the motorway that bisected my hometown. When it snowed, the plows would often times just stop at the bottom of the hill; then, the drivers leaning out of their cabs, they would scratch their heads, eventually trying an ascent that always ended fifty feet up with their vehicles wildly spinning out of control, back down into incoming highway traffic. Needless to say, it was the best street ever to live on if you loved to sled, and I have many fond memories of kicking off from the top of the hill on my hand-me-down Flexible Flyer, shooting down in a fire storm of steam and molten metal shards like a bullet sliding through a well-oiled gun barrrel, then launching through and across the highway at a thousand miles an hour, leaving a killing fields of jack-knifed semis and exploding car wrecks in my wake. It was awesome.