February stinks in this town. The sky is the color of concrete and the cold air smells vaguely of wet dog hair and old rubber boots and bus fumes. Get a whiff of that first thing in the morning, brother, all you want to do is go back to bed.
This is not the place to be, except we're all here, so what does that tell you?
February means slippery sidewalks and cars that won't start in the morning and the second month of that diet you began New Year's Day, the one that's left you meaner than a wolverine.
This is how bad it is with me now: If you and I happened upon a stray Hershey Kiss that had fallen under the couch months ago and was now covered with cobwebs and dust and cat hairs, and you made a move for it, I would bite your hand.
February means people are surly, bored, restless, cooped up, ready to jump down each other's throats. A friend was in a bookstore the other day and asked the sales clerk where the self-help books were.
"If I told you that, it would defeat the whole purpose," said the clerk.
No, she didn't say that. That's an old joke. My friend says the clerk, a teen-ager with a ring through her eyebrow, simply ignored her and continued her conversation with her future-convict boyfriend.
This is how boring February is: It doesn't even have any cool holidays. It has Valentine's Day and President's Day, which are strictly junior varsity holidays. You wonder why they didn't just go ahead and stick Arbor Day in February, too.
Up in some little burg in Pennsylvania, the whole town turns out to poke a groundhog with a stick so he'll come out of his hole and tell us if winter is nearly over.
If he sees his shadow, it means . . . well, I don't know what it means. But that's February for you. There's nothing else to do, so we tease small animals.
February used to mean that we had baseball to look forward to, but not anymore.
Now when the spring training camps open, they might feature "replacement players," beefy guys with gold chains who look like they should be wearing aquamarine uniforms that say "Al's Qwik Mart."
On ESPN, they showed some potential replacement players working out in Florida. It was a hoot. A coach yelled "Lay one down!" to a guy taking cuts in the batting cage, and the guy looked at him like he was speaking Portuguese.
Up on a hill in northern Baltimore County, in a house the size of a NATO air base, Cal Ripken, the best shortstop to ever play the game, sits out the strike.
I drove by his place yesterday and wondered what he thought of these warehouse workers and hamburger-slingers eager to take his job.
No, I didn't stop to ask him. What kind of a person do you take me for? Besides, the gate was locked.
February is the cruelest month for parents of young kids.
If you tell the kids to go play outside, they look at you like you asked them to play with poisonous snakes.
When you do persuade them to go outdoors, you have to put on their boots, snow pants, gloves, hat, scarf, coat.
Invariably, five minutes later, one of them is back inside.
"I have to go to the bathroom," he says. So you take off his boots, snow pants, gloves, hat, scarf and coat.
He takes two steps toward the bathroom and then announces that he's changed his mind. Heh, heh, don't have to go after all, he says.
So now you put on his boots, snow pants, gloves, hat, scarf and coat again. Only by this time, you're dripping with perspiration and your heart is beating like a rabbit's and you're trying not to black out.
Speaking of blacking out, February means the health clubs and gyms are packed with puffing, red-faced men and women running on treadmills and jumping on StairMasters and grunting on the Nautilus equipment.
When the weather turns warm, you could detonate a small nuclear device in any one of these places and be reasonably assured of not hurting anyone, it'll be so empty.
As I write this, the temperature is 26 degrees and the sky outside my window has turned the color of cigar ash. And now my eyes wander to a magazine ad for the Cayman Islands.
Come share our clear, blue, protected waters, it says. Visit our soft, safe, white coral beaches. Enjoy diving, snorkeling, fishing, golf, tennis and shopping.
There is no mention of teasing groundhogs, which can only be a good thing.