The Weather Report
March 15, 2004
Column by Brandon Copple

An Introduction to The Weather Report

Current Conditions: Sunny. 23°. Winds W10mph. Wind Chill 15°. So cold you could piss and lean on it.

Welcome to the Weather Report, a new 2Walls column dedicated to providing thoughtful, provocative analysis of current events.

Actually, that sounds pretty fucking boring. Let’s dedicate it to providing something else. I know: how about nothing in particular. One sure way to succeed is to keep expectations low, so let’s make it clear, from the get-go, that the Weather Report, the WR, promises not to be about anything in particular.

I’ll sell it to the Webmaster later.

Note that being about nothing in particular is different than being about nothing. The WR will have to be about something – probably whatever is troubling me at the moment – but it won’t be about any one particular thing, or group of things or subgroup of things (another path to success: shroud your goals in confusion).

It’ll be politics this month, music next month and baseball the month after that. Or whatever. Those seem like good topics and I’m sure we’ll see them around. Hopefully there’ll be other stuff too. Hopefully I’ll have something to say every month.

Not that I’m worried. I’m a newspaper editor so I know how to fill space. The newspaperman’s great trade secret is how to fill empty space with nothing.

One good way is with recurring features – a column that comes in every week or a little photo contest (printing the winner takes up space too). I’ll employ that technique here, with a couple of regular features you can count on to help fill the void (which didn’t exist until I created it; another of the existential wonders of the Web).

I promise a regular report on the weather, in keeping with the WR’s title. I’ll try to keep this interesting. I’m a Midwestern guy so the weather is visceral to me; my hope is to convey a sense of how atmospheric forces shape my moods, my perspective. Don’t worry: I’ll keep it short.

I also promise a monthly list. I think I’ll call it "The List." The trend in print media is toward more graphical presentation of information, and I don’t want to buck the trend, so I will make a list.

This is also, I confess, an idea stolen from a book, Naïve. Super by Erlend Loe. It’s a great book, one that you should read right away. Here it is.

So let’s get started. The weather you already read, or skipped. Now I’ll give you a list. A list of things I believe in. This is not meant as a “Bull Durham”-type rant, just a measured inventory of the things I believe in. Maybe it will tell you a little about me (again, filling a void that wasn’t there a second ago). But do me a favor and don’t psychoanalyze it, or if you do, don’t tell me what my list says about me. I don’t wanna hear it.

Here are the Things I Believe In:

• Lori
• Music
• Happy Hour
• Saturdays
• My Mom
• The warm smell where my dogs sleep
• My Friends
• Red Wine that costs less than $20
• The NCAA Tournament
• Summer Nights
• Bars
• Strong Coffee, Black
• The way one of my fiancée’s curls falls in front of her eyes
• America (think Walt Whitman, not Toby Keith)
• Small-Market Ballclubs
• The Active Tense
• Love
• Beating Missouri
• Red Meat
• Reading a Book In Bed
• Knowing
• The Interstate Highway System
• Death

(Brandon Copple is a volunteer staff writer for 2 Walls Webzine)