starry night

It has been unseasonably warm. I came to Montreal because I wanted cold and sunny and this has been the grayest winter in history so far, and everyone is walking around talking about how nice it is that its warm. Tonight though the clouds broke and the stars are out. Usually that means it's colder than an assdiggers grave. The wind of skating blows right through your clothes so that you look down at your legs asking, "Did I forget to put on pants?" But tonight it was minus two or three, and those pretty stars watching the hockey a million miles below, approvingly. The ice is the shits but what can you expect when we've been having warm days? I watched some of the guys, how they handled the puck. A couple could do this thing where they would turn their wrists so that the blade of the stick momentarily looked ductile, as if it had gone from being a 10 degree curve to a 180 degree curve, a perfect puck-shaped hook, and then had sprung back all in a second. I watched how the guys who know how to play take an all encompassing look around the ice just before they get to the puck so that they know where they want to pass to and swore to0 myself that I would do that the next time I was going into the boards to retrieve the puck and then failed to do so. A dozen times. It is a lot easier to do, if, like the good players you are working in Matrix time. I feel like the poor bullets which Keanu Reeves can just dodge like they're moving through water.
The other day, back when the cold was hard, I saw someone out skating at 7:15 one morning all alone. If you're reading this; way to go.