O my god, I need sun. Now.

The first year I lived here in Puddletown, the effect of the sunless winter was negligible. I had been warned about its ill effects, but after the bloodless and desperate winters I’d experienced in the Northeast, I figured the Willamette Valley would be a piece of cake. Last year, it was. This year, I’m ready to claw through the wall for some solar warmth. It’s like my fingers and toes never get completely warm. I feel like that nemesis of Superman’s who would curl up into a fetal position every time the sun went behind a cloud.

There was a Saturday Night Live gag commercial (they were always my favorite) where Chris Farley has a cold, and complains to his wife. She recommends the latest breakthrough in cold-fighting technology, Hibernol. She hands him a five-gallon bucket of this green stuff and he guzzles down. It’s supposed to cold cock you (damn that’s some fine-ass malt licker) all winter long, so by the time you woke up, not only was your cold gone, so was the winter.

I want that stuff so bad right now I can taste it.

Without ultra-violet radiation, I find myself less motivated than ever. “Not you, Scott! How could you be even LESS motivated than usual?!” you’re probably asking yourself. I haven’t brushed behind my bottom teeth for weeks. I had uncooked rice and a raw potato for dinner last night. I’m lucky if I can bring myself to wipe every OTHER time I go. It’s getting bad.

Most people don’t know that humans need the sun to survive. Sure, we need it to grow stuff and to tell time, and to charge that huge bank of hippie solar cells to gather enough energy to heat a cup of stick-tea, but exposure to sunlight on our skin allows our bodies to metabolize vitamin D, a very important nutrient. This nutrient is provided by many of the things we eat, and is also fortified in breads and dairy products, but without sunlight, vitamin D is not “bioavailable” (absorbable). Experiancing a vitamin D deficiency, a person can develop depression, psychosis and eventually psychotic dementia. The native Alaskans (Eskimos, Inuits, whatever you wanna call ‘em) describe a common occurrence called Pibloktok (pih-blok-tok). Because the winters are so harsh, and the long cycles of sunless days, occasionally someone would just simply lose their minds. These episodes would play out almost identically person to person, generation to generation. The individual in question would throw open the entrance to their tent, and begin running around the village like their ass was on fire, screaming like a banshee. They would then, in a fit of dementia, tear off all their oily seal-clothes and charge around, waving their hands and yelling. The really neat thing however, is that the villagers are supposed to completely ignore it, and pretend it’s not happening. The assumption is that some wily demon had possessed their fellow villager, and if we ignore it, it’ll just go away.

So, just a notice to all you non-Inuits, if you see me running down the street stark naked, screaming like little girl and waving my arms around, pretend I’m not there.