It's a slippery slope

It starts off innocently enough. With a few flurries tantalizingly falling from above. But you don’t think much of it. Like a perp with actual blood on their hands recounting an elaborately constructed, extremely absurd, clearly fabricated alibi, it just doesn’t stick. Not yet anyway.

Let’s remember that your driveway is on a slight incline, facing the busy street below. Oncoming traffic, as it’s often called, awaits your next move. This is the environment you sought out after too much time under the shady palms and shadier people of southern California. Because as slippery as things get in the famed Great Plains, the slopes are never quite like this. 

Before slinking off to sleep one winter night, you check the window and then tomorrow’s forecast. You start to worry about the commute. You’re not prepared. Your boots are in storage and your loafers won’t do the job. Not when show shoes are needed or those ice boots with pointy little spikes for traction. Do you even own a pickaxe? 

No, on a day like this, people would stay home and not work. That's when society starts to unravel. At the top of your driveway you are transported to a childhood of slipping, sliding, and sledding full snow days. It’s perfect. You haven’t calculated the mathematical slope since high school, which, interestingly enough, is also the last time you indulged in this brand of unbridled sledding. The only rise and rise you’re concerned with is connected to the cheap piece of plastic you’re laying face down on. This is much to the dismay of area children with similar interests, who lack the requirements to compete with your skills and body mass. 

This is how the breakdown of civilization begins. You can’t drive. You can’t go to work. But you can break out the ancient sled from storage, taking it for a few spins down the block. The cars give up, with each passing driver growing more envious of your icy recreation. Pretty soon everyone is out sledding. Whole streets are closed down to traffic. People and their families gather at the top of hills all across the city barreling down into a snowier future. It gets colder though, as things melt then they freeze again. 

When the snow clears, we have an entire society that has given up their responsibilites for another shot at a lifetime of slippery pursuits. You’re suddenly skipping breakfast to sled, pawning off clothes and furniture for a fresh shot at the slopes. Imagine going to a big ski resort with a sled, watching as the skiiers and boarders look on in horror. But this is what happens when we build societies that aren’t level. Picture a future where the climate changes to such a degree that a place like San Francisco, with its stupid hills and idiotic topography, gets blanketed in snow. Now that’s a slippery slope.