I just don't like winter. Every year at this time the ads come on TV, advising me that this is the most wonderful time of the year (humbug!) and that I should get outside, tug on a toque, and smell the pine scented air, preferably from atop a pair of skis or skates purchased from one of my fine local retailers.
Unfortunately, I'm only fond of "sports" which can be conducted somewhere warm and preferably dry. Online video games, Scrabble, and competitive sleeping are my favourite winter pursuits.
Normally, I write about 15 extra columns and a few news stories ("Politicians made people mad" and "Criminals are dumb" can be written weeks in advance) and then go to sleep for two or three months.
I've missed my deadline to start hibernating for the season. For the serious hibernator, the time to begin is late August/early September, when you should start your all peanut butter diet and begin lining your burrow with yak fur.
Having forgotten to buy the peanut butter and embroiled in a lawsuit against a negligent yak fur vendor from Kathmandu, I am reluctantly moving on to Plan B.
I'm going to have myself frozen until next spring.
This is a bit pricey, but compared to the cost of three months of gas, food, car insurance, rent, and power bills, it's actually cheap.
I do see the irony in having myself frozen to avoid the cold, but a bit of cryonic stasis will leave me thoroughly unconscious. As unconscious as you can get, since I'll technically be dead.
This is also a good way to get out of paying some taxes, FYI.
In the spring, I'll be bathed in a warm bath of goo by technicians who will zap my heart back to life and get me to sign all my government-mandated reanimation forms on the way out, certifying that I am indeed fully alive and that I do not crave the blood, flesh, and/or brains of the living.
This year, I might save even more by having just my head frozen.
It's a lot cheaper to get the cocoanut lopped off and stored by itself. You need a lot less liquid nitrogen, and the head storage unit is the bachelor suite of cryonic holding facilities.
I'm still trying to decide what to do with my body.
I could rent it out, thus making a profit from my voyage away from the land of the living.
There are always UFC fighters looking for a sparring dummy, but I'd need them to certify that I'd get it back with all its bones intact.
I could also attach a half-empty pickle jar to the neck hole
and send it out on the sideshow circuit as "Picklo, the Man With the Pickle Jar Head."
But there are already two Picklos working the circuit, and they hate competition. The one from Wisconsin is pretty litigious, I've heard, and all my legal funds are tied up in Claxton versus Yak Emporium.
Work as a crash test dummy, scarecrow, or life-sized game of Operation doesn't pay as well as it used to. I blame all the outsourcing to headless bodies overseas.
Whatever I wind up doing with it, by next March I'll be ready to have my head sewn back on, and with the delicate nerve fibres in my spine reattached using Krazy Glue, I'll be up and about again.
Skipping winter is its own reward. No long, dark nights that never seem to end. No mornings spent scraping frozen crow poop off the car windshield. No fighting the crowds of mall zombies for Christmas presents.
I'd rather go the pickle jar route.
Matthew Claxton reports for the Langley Advance.
