Dirty Ice in Wheel Well. Goddess and Mezzanine.

As a San Franciscan, my mind -- if not my budget -- is always running to matters of style. Posh clothes from Wilkes Bashford, a Maserati to drive up to Napa on weekends, logo-splashed cycling jerseys for just the right look as you glide across the Golden Gate on your Colnago. It's a sybaritic malaise for which there is only one cure: the Midwest.

Just back from two weeks in the tundric wastes of Iowa. When snow falls, ice forms, slush pools, and frost blinds you to oncoming traffic, when nose hairs crinkle and snap, it's all about survival. Dreams of Versace lost under puffy, mismatched layers of wool, down, fleece, and nylon and stuffed into slush-covered boots. Ice, snow and filth accrete into stalactites around your wheel wells, morphing the Maserati of your fantasies into a '72 Ford LTD. And jogging is seen clearly for what it is: an exercise in bourgeois, West Coast narcissism, a waste of vital energy that should be used for hunkering down.

Californians don't understand hunkering. That's too bad. A good hunker is very centering.

The moral compass of this country, its only hope in the current political climate, is the hunker vote. Delusional, imperial ambitions cannot float for long against the irresitible, stoic gravity of the hunkerers, the counterweight of big, snaggy chunks of ice and grit and dirt and corn chaff lining the underbody of your '69 Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser wagon. Forget the democratization of the Muslim world -- will the damn car start?

A note on the flight -- at the airport, the waiting area may be filled with seraphic lovelies, but my seatmate is inevitably the grunting equipment salesman who smells like sausage, his abundant midsection breaching the armrest and smushing me against the window. Yesterday, however, on the all-too-short flight from Moline, Illinois to Chicago I sat next to a goddess with her nose in a Nicolson Baker book. We got to talking about The Mezzanine, which she had not only read but enjoyed. So right there you're talking soul-mate. And even though she was married, and lived in Brooklyn, it's nice to know that women like that exist. Gives a single man hope.

Unless she was the only woman who has read and liked that book. Which is possible.