the sun looking at me all cockeyed

several times already this year I have been gently arrested by the realization that all this cold, this snow, this bitter wind, and lack of leaves and flowers, all of this is thanks to a little teeny tilt of the earth on its axis.

But it’s not the distance from the sun that has us all bundled in fur and wool in the winter and stripped down to our skivvies in the summer like I for a long time thought. That’s only a 2 per cent distance variation from summer to winter after all, which makes for only a 4 per cent change in temperature. The real fweezing/buwning comes not from how far the sun has to travel but how it hits us.

Ya know when you’re out in the garden in July and you suddenly understand that the sun isn’t shining on you but at you and so you slather more SPF 105 over your face and raise your zinc-stained fist and swear the sun your eternal enemy?

Yeah, that’s b/c in the summer the sun is shining down and raining ultraviolet blows about your head and shoulders like Mike Tyson circa ’85. In the winter when we’re tilted away like Ali circa ’63 there are fewer hours of light and that light is hitting us all aslant so less of its punishment is absorbed. Glancing blows rather than a square wallop to the chops.

Being the übercracker that I am, I vastly prefer winter light to summer. That plus my metabolism is evolved from eons of long-cold-winter starvers. With enough fur and wool then I am ready for the winters I was born for. Verily I say unto skadi: bring it.