Led Black: I hate my Northface

I HATE MY NORTH FACE: AN ODE TO SPRING

I have a love-hate relationship with my North Face. Let me explain: I don’t have one of those thin, lightweight - walk in the park on a slightly brisk morning North Faces. No, I have a climb up Mt. Kilimanjaro (pre-global warming) North Face, the type of North Face that you can wear outside on a frigid day with a soaking wet wife-beater underneath and not feel a thing. I wait until all hope is lost and the real cold weather has set in to pull it out of the closet. It is a weapon of last resort. Speaking of pulling it out the closet, it literally takes up my entire closet.

It must take a whole school of geese or whatever you call a bunch of geese to supply the feathers to fill my coat. I’m serious, a good dozen v-formations of geese is necessary just to pad this monstrosity. It is heavy, cumbersome and completely impervious to the elements, I think it might even be bulletproof. Once I was driving with it on and it took me about 5 minutes of hard fought struggle to remove it as I drove, I almost crashed. If I had crashed, I’m sure I would have survived unscathed because my North Face is way better than any airbag. Another thing about my North Face is that it has mad pockets; it has pockets inside of pockets under pockets. On one occasion in Washington Heights a cop harassed me because I “fit the description.” He proceeded to illegally frisk me; dude got tired from fruitlessly searching through the countless pockets on my North Face. Needless to say he didn’t find the twenty sac of high-grade marijuana I had stashed, to be completely honest, neither did I. I still haven’t, it ended up in North Face pocket limbo.

It’s not that I really hate my North Face but I loathe what my North Face represents, bitterly cold weather. I have lived in this country since I arrived from the Dominican Republic when I was 5 and I still have not completely adjusted to extremely low temperatures or as my father refers to it, “un frío de película.” I welcome spring every year by putting away the North Face until the next winter. With climate change being what it is, winter might arrive by June. But in any case, spring is almost here and life is good. Long live spring!!!