Billy Below-Zero Heats Up Valentine's Day

Billy Below-Zero originally wrote me from the South Pole close to a year ago. (I should note that while I rarely post in real-time, this one's a sort of real-world Valentine's Day Special. So grab some chocolates or whiskey or however you celebrate/anti-celebrate this Hallmark Spectacular and... enjoy?)

(Love has no boundaries, man.)

So, long ago and far away, I somehow acquired this pen-pal in Antarctica, whilst residing in Fort Billy - a small-to-medium-ish college town smack-dab in the middle of the continent - within striking distance of some things, but really close to... well, not much.

When Billy Below-Zero first emailed me (yes, via an unnamed dating site), I'll admit it - I was uninterested in the actual dating sense, because even manageable semi-trans-continental distance no longer floats my boat, let alone full-hemispherical challenges. But, given his situation, I was more than a little intrigued and wanted to mine him for his current life data, and so I wrote him back. I mean, I was doing the transition-to-grad-school-type day-to-day drudgery of field work and not getting anything else I wanted or needed, such as funding or even admittance into the goddamn study lab I coveted, while this guy was doing something completely off the wall - living and working at an atmospheric research station on the South Pole. I mean, these fuckers are stuck down there for four months at a stretch with NO ESCAPE - as in, no resupply planes from ANYwhere, no medical evacuation, no transportation of any kind capable of arriving or departing in the deep winter. Non-negotiable.

(Oh hey, Billy Torrance! You're just in time for happy hour!)

You go crazy? They literally restrain you in a padded room and wait it out, no chance to plead your case. You wander outside drunkenly at night and get lost? Sayonara. You die? Corpsicle on months-long deep-freeze in a merely-unheated room till they can get you out on a convenient flight next spring. Just 50-something scientific souls, of which 4 to 5 max are female (seriously, goddammit, STEM fields recruiting), sealed off with no physical exchange and patchy-at-best internet contact with the outside world.

And according to Billy Below-Zero, what do they do as a traditional rite-of passage when the last resupply flight of the season takes off from Amundsen-Scott bound for Aukland, leaving them essentially stranded in a place devoid of daylight for one third of a year? They get together and watch either The Shining or The Thing. I mean, come on. I dare any writer-type on Earth to try to tell me they wouldn't have been driven to glean some stories out of this guy, and I was more than happy to cough up some normalcy for him to have and hold in exchange.

(Quit overthinking this, Billy.)

I never did decipher what search initially led him to me (he'd never been to Fort Billy, had zero geographic ties, we had no apparent social overlaps), but that's beside the point.  The point is, for a few weeks of harmless distraction, I was really taken by Billy Below-Zero's tales of middle-of-the-night fire-scares (because the place is apparently comparable to a space-station, in that a structurally-damaging fire could actually threaten survival), the hallucinogenic-level nightly Aurora Borealis, the archetype mad scientists and cafeteria cook simpletons he was stranded with. It was all goddamn fascinating. And in exchange for this titillating peek into his bizarro-dimension, Billy Below-Zero got, from my end, what he apparently craved: mundane tales of the everyday and the occasional photo of summer - with actual sunlight! - in the high country.

For a few weeks.

And then, I grew bored and ran out of time to be endlessly emailing some stranger whose interest in my personal life seemed to be becoming increasingly-inappropriate. I was sending him stupid little anecdotes about dog walks and on-campus politics, and he was suggesting, via flowery 2,000-word diatribes, flying me out to New Zealand to meet him upon his disembarkation from exile. I was briefly joking about having my weekly awkward dinners with my parents, and he was speculating at essay-length about what it would be like – which for him included, apparently, the rules he would have to institute –  the first time we (hypothetically) "made love."

(Wait. This isn't hypothetical to you at all, is it?)

It was time to pull the plug.

And so, Billy Below-Zero sank into a deep-drift of unanswered emails, and I went on about my real life. So go the fickle snowstorms upon the oft-overlooked continent at the bottom of the social globe that is online dating. 

Then, time progressed until riiiight about now, with nary a word from Billy Below-Zero. Until, all of a sudden (because just of course), he popped back up in my (non-dating-site, regular-email) inbox. By now I'd been seeing someone for a few months, and had all but forgotten about Billy Below-Zero and his South Pole life for at least eight. The email was lengthy, but can be summarized like so:

"Hey! I'm done in the Antarctic! How are you doing?!"

Well. How to respond?

On the one hand, yeah, I'd emailed this Billy months ago, and yeah, he was interesting and engaging and utilized proper punctuation and selected the appropriate homonyms in his discourses so of course he had points there. On the other twelve or so hands, aforementioned current Billy and I were flirting with an actual relationship, I didn't have anything else to really wonder about regarding life at the South Pole, and, truth be told, I was just not that interested in continuing a pen-pal exchange. 

I gingerly bit.

And maybe I should have foreseen what I got back today:

"So guess what? I just decided to move to Fort Billy!! No job, just hangin' out..."  said Billy Below-Zero. 

"How about a Valentine's Day beer?"

(It's just weird. Any way you slice it.)

What. The. Fuck.

Let me be clear: Fort Billy is not really a destination city for anything, save a few select programs at the university. Fort Billy isn't the most convenient town for skiing, for the mountains, for lake recreation, for the coast, for cultural events, for big-city access, for anything. And yeah, Fort Billy is a pretty neat little college town... but it is what I've long referred to as "a town of bartenders with Masters degrees." There are just not many entry-level career-type jobs outside of academia. Hence, there exists in Fort Billy a dearth of single, available dating prospects that are older than undergrad-age, because you either do your school here and move on, or you move here mid-career, with your spouse and kids in tow.

Or, say... you "randomly" relocate from friggin Antarctica because who the fuck knows why, except just maybe you did it on a mildly-obsessive whim because someone lives here with whom you want to meet up.

And so today, in the midst of the endless grant proposal season loop of edits and re-edits, on a day in which my most recent Billy is actually booked for the evening with a band gig (to be fair, I suspect he'd likely be highly amused by whatever trainwreck story could possibly come of any such meetup and would probably encourage it), and on a day when I wake up to Punchin' Judy's triumphant text announcement that her long term on-and-off finally jammed a rock onto her mitt last night, this is looking to be my most tantalizing Valentine's Day proposition.

(But... I mean... do I at least get that beer first?)

***

Eh, you're right. I shouldn't break my wine-drinking date with my cat.