152: Absolute zero

Shivering on the electric blanket; every time a piece of flesh peaks out from beneath the covers, the frosty teeth in the air bite away chunks.  My fingers are worn down to raw nubs, like half eaten Mini Milks.  The drain for the kitchen sink seems to have frozen and is causing a leak from the washing machine outlet.  Droplets of liquid nitrogen hang in the air, feeling like burning coals as the freeze my skin.  The radiators can barely muster the effort to gasp out one degree centigrade, and my toes snap and drop off one by one.

I awoke from a dream world of a snowball Earth where frozen seas create a new icy supercontinent.  Snowmen had colonised all the frozen land and sea with vast sprawling megacities, and all vestiges of humanity lay forgotten under ten kilometres of ice and snow.  Sentient snowmanity dominates and past present and future shows no sign of things ever being different.  Measurements such as centigrade and Fahrenheit are long forgotten and would be impractical, focused as they are around unbearably hot temperatures; 0°c is equal to the fatally hot 273 Kelvin, the point where snowmanity and all snowman civilisation turns into lifeless liquid water.

my street as viewed from the window

The concept of Absolute Zero is worshipped as a god-like ideal in the same way the Borg revere the Omega particle.  Pure bars of the noble metal Rhodium sit on altars, contained within a field and cooled to less than 1 K.  Snowman scientists reach out to the Boomerang Nebula as the coldest naturally occurring place in the currently observable universe, and faithful snowmen bow their heads to the ground and weep joyful tears as they contemplate eternal life in the Nebula.  Religious texts speak of a singularity of Absolute Zero located in its centre.  Absolute Zero is said to grant wishes, cause natural disasters, occupy our thoughts and judge us after death.

I thought it a fleeting dream until I felt the encroaching cold and looked out of the window to see my ‘dream’ was a terribly accurate premonition.  Car bumpers are bearded with icicles and the pavement edges deeper down as the ice piles higher.  My insignificant and broken street has never seen a highway gritter, and soon it will be too late.

Blah blah cold, blah blah made up stuff about blah blah cold.  It’s about time I got up, put some hot water down the sink, sorted out the blockage, do the fucking dishes, tidy the flat, do some packing for tomorrow (fingers crossed for the flight), visited my friends and newly crawling godson, had a Christmas themed drink and all the other stuff.  Right; blog done for the day.  One chore down, a million more to complete.