When you hit black ice, even in relationships, don’t slam on the breaks, but be patient, and steer yourself into the skid thus facing it.
Escalation: To increase in attitude, magnitude, etc.
A lot of life escalates: Arguments, car wrecks, Love, love-making, sex, etc. Not all escalation is bad however.
Last night Rodrigo and I escalated. We went further than we’d ever gone before. We hit that black ice and steered towards each other, feeling a definite sense of panic, but also a sense of relief to simply let go, and careen, silently, except for moans, towards an inevitable end. Not a crash, but more of an intersection. Last night we escalated.
When you’re driving down the familiar back country road of your bedroom, the only light coming through the tree-like slats of your window, a midnight moon silvered by
trees, you know the road like the back of your hand, and then it happens, the skid, the loss of control, the giving up to happenstance, the thoughts of demolition, of crashing, flailing into an abutment, or rail, or, like Rodrigo and I, into each other.
But the crash into Rodrigo isn’t a single crash. No, it’s a repetitive 
crash. Like cymbals in a marching band or drums in a drum line. It’s a repetitive crash like an automatic weapon, which, when it ends, makes you sweat, exhausted, and, frankly, happy to be alive.
An escalation doesn’t always have to be negative. An escalating skid on black ice covering familiar roads will end in a collision. Hopefully, just like Rodrigo and I.
The snow which fell in Charlotte inspired me. Children of the south celebrating a snow day and running sleds down the lowest of hills inspire me. Cardinals and wrens landing on pine boughs covered with light snow causing a puff beneath their feet.
It’s snowing in Charlotte this morning. While not a blizzard, Charlotte’s citizens treat it as one. For me it signifies the start of winter. Winter is the one season that I don’t miss. What I do miss is that first snowfall. Which fell this morning in Charlotte.
across the schoolyard on my way to Weinlien’s to buy a gallon of milk, and it was snowing lightly, flurries is what we called them, and I ran freely catching these molted angel feathers on my tongue.
landed atop frozen rain causing gross miscalculations of body weight plus snow gear plus sled divided by depth of ice and pitch of schoolyard, resulting in my one out-of-control run sending me speeding into a fence which opened at the bottom and out I flew like a nylon torpedo onto the sidewalk three feet below.
A few nights ago an interesting thing landed in Charlotte; more specifically in my mind. A large writers bLocK dropped squarely between my imagination and inspiration.
leave, you won’t have your writer’s bLocK. That’ll be better for you, won’t it?” he asked.
strength of the rope that binds us together. How about if we give ourselves enough time to have an argument. To see where we go, or where we run to, when things aren’t as rosy as they are now. Let’s give us that time together.”
HARLAN DIDRICKSON 