The Daily: 14 January 2025

In my town, it has snowed every day but one in 2025, not that you’d know it by looking at the weather forecast, nor the officially “recorded” conditions. For example, yesterday it was supposed to be sunny with a high of 34°F. I thought I might finally be able to shovel my walk and maybe see Mars dip behind the Moon. But nope and nope. Highest temperature I saw was 26°F, and it started snowing at about 11am. It was 19°F and still snowing when I went out to see if there was a moon-sized hole in the clouds at 7:30pm. Probably snowed all night. Yet at Weather.com, the recorded total snowfall for my town for all of January is less than three-quarters of an inch. There was more than that on my car when I came out of work yesterday.

I am starting to feel paranoid about this. What is the point? Who is benefitting from this? How and why is there any benefit? Is it really just so crass as using AI to eliminate payroll costs? We all get to be blind-sided by the weather so that some media conglomerate can pocket a few more dollars each day. Is that really it?

I will grant them one thing: the snow is weird. It has been very cold, near 0°F most days, though thankfully not dropping much below that at night. It has also been quite breezy, often windy. With these conditions, it should be dry. The air shouldn’t be able to hold this much moisture, and, in fact, it hasn’t been notably cloudy. Many days, it has been bright, with patches of blue above the snow showers. The moon has, in fact, been visible even as the flakes are falling all around. This is not normal snow, falling from clouds high above. It seems as if the air itself is freezing in place, coalescing into minute crystals that are set flying on the breeze.

It is very dry snow, fine and powdery and hardly settling, intent on riding the winds from here to the Atlantic. My back yard has barely more than a foot of accumulation, though the air has been free of flakes for only a few dozen hours this year. There has been no melt, though I wouldn’t rule out sublimation, with the settled crystals transforming directly into air — and then solidifying once again into fine flakes. I imagine this snow is hard to see on a radar screen. It is hard enough to see when you are looking out the window, the tiny flakes appearing more like mist and haze. Often the snow is only truly visible against a dark background or under the streetlights at night, though it is thick enough to fog the valley so that most days visibility is measured in meters.

I have mostly given up on shoveling. The biggest storm happened while I was out of town, and that basal layer froze solid before I got home. It would break my shovel. But if I did not get it all up, I would be walking on ice. I prefer snow. It provides more traction. So my back walk is packed snow, about six inches deep, close to the height of the bottom porch step. I suppose it’s pretty, if I want to put a positive spin on a situation I can’t control.

Though maybe we’re getting too much spinning…

Presumably due to bad meteorology — in which there has not been one forecast that correctly predicted a day of snow — there has been slipshod preparation for weather, including snow removal from the roads, which hasn’t happened in any organized fashion yet this winter. Snow is being “removed” by cars driving on it. Of course, when it’s this cold, pressure melt instantly freezes as soon as the car passes and the pressure is released. Thus, much of the snow is underlain by ice. I have not driven anywhere in these first two weeks of the year without seeing at least one accident. I would say the auto mechanics around here are having a bonanza, except I know at least one who says he couldn’t get the necessary parts to repair all these damages, even if he could get all his employees into work for one solid day.

Needless to say, this is causing mayhem, but it’s a muted mayhem. We’ve not had one day to breathe freely, but the source of stress is barely perceptible. It’s a low-level exhaustion hanging in the air, an oppressive fog, intangible but omnipresent and enveloping. It’s a quiet and grinding disaster, not as flashy as an ice storm nor as all-encompassing as a flood nor as devastating as fire, but lasting so long we’ve stopped noticing how tired we are. Nor do we seem to remember that cars stranded along the side of the road every day is not normal. Not even for Vermont winter.

Or maybe it is normal…

Son#1 and I took the train down to Brooklyn for our Twelfth Night trip. This gave me ample time to stare out the window and really see the state of things these days. And the state is horrifying. Trash covers every surface, most of it toxic in addition to being oppressively ugly. Buildings and infrastructure are decaying. I saw multiple houses that had collapsed walls and no roof, many that had styrofoam panels in place of siding, nearly all needed repair to some large degree. Frighteningly, most were inhabited, with smoke rising out of chimneys and shiny cars parked out front. Even more frightening, most bridges and roads are terrifyingly crumbly, with spongy concrete and rusting struts. (Nothing like taking a train over the Connecticut River and seeing water through holes in the bridge.) The railways are lined with repair projects that seem to have stalled out in the last century, given the advanced state of rot and rust on the piles of rails and ties and the dilapidated service machines permanently fused to weed-choked sidings. I know the immediate area around train tracks is not prime real estate, but this trip takes you through one of the highest concentrations of wealth in the world — and that wealth is nowhere apparent. What is Massachusetts spending its wealth on? Connecticut? New York? Certainly not on maintenance. But it’s not just along the railroad tracks.

On the way out of town, I was treated to more degeneration, but this time in the heart of Manhattan. Because Son#1 has cerebral palsy and there are no handicap access Metro stations near where Son#2 lives, I decided we would take a Lyft to Penn Station (because the bus system just can’t get you there in less than half a day and there are no actual cabs anymore). I just didn’t feel that I could carry all the bags up and down the stairs, and he could carry nothing. It takes all his effort just to get up and down, without baggage further throwing him off balance. (Down is especially bad…)

(I’m going to pause briefly here to highlight the fact that Flatbush has no subway stations available to people with mobility issues. This, in a neighborhood — a poor, mostly Black immigrant neighborhood — that is filled with older people, most of whom have mobility issues and few of whom have cars… I suppose this is a brutally effective way to localize…)

In any case, riding in the back of a car is another invite to gaze out windows, an unusual opportunity for me. I don’t often see much between destinations because most of my traveling around New York City is via subway deep underground. So for the first time in a long while, I got to see some of the most prized real estate in the world, the most vibrant business sectors, the flashiest shopping districts. And I was not impressed. Once again, there is trash everywhere. Not just the occasional straw or styrofoam cup, but piles of refuse. It’s like people have given up on trash collection and just started their own middens on street corners, in doorways, and particularly around any hapless sidewalk tree plantings. I saw more than one plastic diaper, among other foulness. And everything is crumbling, from roads to skyscrapers, with very little repair work in evidence. To the contrary, it seems that most construction and renovation projects ground to a halt in 2020 or so and never got going again. Now, it is all broken fences and catawampus scaffolding and ragged piles of building materials with nary a builder in sight — even on a weekday morning.

I was also struck by the uselessness of nearly everything. There are dozens of restaurants, at least three per block it seems. There are no grocery stores. Instead, there are bodegas that sell chips and cigarettes and oceans of bottled drinks, but no milk or veg or bread. Never mind flour. There are glitzy clothing shops and hair salons, but few places you could buy a winter coat or warm boots, soap or toothpaste. I have no idea where you go if you need tools or supplies. Where do you buy a screwdriver or grout or plumber’s tape in New York? And there are no bookstores or music shops anymore… There are also few place to go for health care. Possibly some of the upper levels of office buildings might be health care facilities, probably more psychological than physiological, but nothing was obviously a medical center. Mostly it was a lot of nothing, nothing essential to any lived experience. How do you meet your needs in such a place? And why is there so much happening that does not meet any needs!

Also, there were so many vacant buildings. The refuse piles and homeless camps in many doorways were testament to the emptiness beyond those doors. Nearly every other ground floor window had “for rent” signs. Many buildings had “available” printed on enormous, apparently permanent signs that swaddled the upper floors. Last month, when we went up the Empire State Building to ogle the city’s holiday lights, I noticed there were numerous towers that had no lights at all — no exterior, but no interior either. A third or more of the upper levels were completely dark, with not even nighttime emergency lights glowing dimly through the darkness. That is, whole stories are unoccupied. A rough estimate of the dark spaces might show that a quarter of the most valuable real estate in the world is unoccupied — and therefore valueless for the present moment. Son#2 says this is a common thing. Some apartments and office suites may be owned by people who buy property like they’re collecting stamps, but most of it is just sitting empty, the building owners waiting on a better market that will likely never come.

And it hit me that this is collapse. This is what it looks like. This relentless and oppressive decay. Negligence and apathy, to the point where it all becomes unseen, unseeable, normal. The perennially bungled AI weather forecasting and crumpled cars and lack of replacement parts, the vacant properties and rusty bridges and ubiquitous trash, even the uselessness of most enterprise. This is collapse, but we can’t see it because we are living it and normalizing it every day, adapting our memories and perception with each daily incremental slide into deeper decay. This has become the world as we know it, as we’ve always known it, we tell ourselves. Except that it wasn’t, until very recently, if only we could get out from under this cloud long enough to remember that halcyon time.

I suspect Late Romans were also surrounded by crumbling viaducts, moldy walls, vacant villas and cracked roads (well, maybe not that last… their roads seem to last forever…). I suspect they, too, couldn’t remember that decay was not the normal state of things. There was also a good deal of propaganda and distracting entertainment, directing attention away from the increasing inability of society to hold itself and its infrastructure together, as there is in our culture (which in many ways is really just a displaced Rome… except for the roads…). Rome with all its order and luxurious wealth couldn’t fix itself, and neither can we. Like Rome, we don’t have the resources and labor hours to keep up with socio-economic entropy. We don’t have the skills or the tools to deal with much of it. All the monetary wealth in the world can not buy what does not exist. Increasingly, it can’t even paper over the disintegration, though I think it’s mostly that we’ve just lost the will. We can’t stop the decay no matter what we resources and labor we throw at it; and so, worn down by futility, we have stopped seeing it. We are now calling it normal.

But this is socio-economic collapse, as sure as it was for Rome throughout the fifth century.

And this weird snow — along with “hydroclimate whiplash” and fires in Los Angeles and December tornadoes across the Southern US — this is climate collapse. We are experiencing climate instability for the first time in recorded memory. The various interacting systems are all out of balance and beating against each other, driven mad by excess heat and wasted energy. This is the breakdown of the atmosphere and the hydrosphere and quite a bit of the lithosphere, which last ought to be reassuringly solid, and yet… it’s crumbling and tumbling and turning into mud, taking whatever is in its path right out to sea…

We are immersed in collapse and are become like the fish who can’t perceive water — while our ocean is festering. The magnitude of the disaster is so enormous, the scale so vast, the causes and effects to interwoven, the costs so unquantifiable. And yet, mostly it is hardly perceptible day to day, each day only a bit worse than yesterday, save for a few deadly punctuation marks. Geologists call this punctuated equilibrium. A continual, slow rolling change at the base of existence, interleaved with landslides and volcanic eruptions and tsunamis that reshape the landscape in a matter of hours. The fiery drama grabs our attention, as it should, but most of the changes through time happen in that constant, low-level rumble of erosion and dissolution that defies perception.

If it were only one thing, maybe we could focus on it and figure out how to do… something… if it were only the warming of the atmosphere, only the breakdown of biological systems, only the corrosion of our society and its toolkits, only the loss of cohesion in… everything we touch. But it is everything, everywhere, all at once. There is no release, no rest, no recuperation. It is relentless — like this weird snow — and constant, even constant collapse, is how we define normal. All this — perhaps soon even deadly fires and tornadoes — is becoming normalized. We can’t remember how we used to be.

Some already can’t. My co-workers don’t seem to be able to reconcile the “current conditions” on their phones with the unforeseen snow outside the window, and they tend to disbelieve what they see in favor of what they are told to see. Similarly, I’ve talked to my mom about August temperatures in the Midwest and how they are already many degrees above when I was a teenager. She does not remember it that way. She thinks it has always been 95°F and 90% humidity. (I know it hasn’t because I have weather journals.) Yet whenever someone dares to talk about the increased extremity in weather, ten other people will shout them down with “well, what about the heat wave of 1976” or some such supposed evidence that things aren’t that different.

It was the same on the train. I don’t think one other person was truly seeing the view and remembering a time when there wasn’t so much corrosion everywhere. I think this is because we are not supposed to see. We have many enforced blinders (mostly screen-based) to keep us from seeing. Socio-economic breakdown is not supposed to exist in our world of superior human ingenuity and mastery, and so we can’t be seeing it. If we do chance to see, accidentally — after our car slides off the road, for example — we are not allowed to mention it in polite society. We are shouted down. — It never happened. It is not happening. Nothing to see here. Move along. Back to work. — And I am guessing most people do just that… even after the car is totaled.

But some of us can still see, and we are very concerned. Every part of our world is breaking down, and, granted, there is nothing we can do to stop it. But we could be adapting ourselves better. Or at all. We could be picking up the trash or scraping away the rust or helping build up our communities or, really, anything but staring at screens and frittering away the remnants of our society on useless crap. Find one small place where some small effort will make the present situation a bit more tolerable and do that work. We could be building new ways of being within this collapse. We could at least recognize that collapse is happening.

But this collapse and our inability to control it is counter to everything we believe about ourselves. So we stubbornly thumb our phones and ignore the windows, and we never talk frankly or honestly about our fears, our exhaustion, and our losses. And we disbelieve and distort our memories. Because if we dare to say anything, we are called derogatory names and heaped with scorn. We may even be fired or cut off from our loved ones…

So, here we living the promised apocalypse… But we idiot ostriches are not seeing it. Meaning we are not doing anything either, even to save ourselves. Because we can’t admit that change is already rolling over us. Because we refuse to see that our way of life has already reached its inevitable conclusion. Because we do not believe in anything so final as collapse. Even as our homes and bridges and lives are unraveling all around us.

And the strange snow keeps falling…

At least, that’s pretty…

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Related to collapse is the enshitification of everything… and related to that… I just discovered that WordPress will no longer allow video embedding without “upgrading to premium”. Which I refuse to do… So the lovely video of snow over my winter garden, accompanied by the wistful late winter mating calls of the resident chickadees is not allowed on this site… and you’re just going to have to take my word for it that some few bits of collapse are, in fact, pretty.

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©Elizabeth Anker 2025