It’s raining outside, and it’s cold. When I was a kid, an age before internet edits, I’d be really pumped about this cold rain. It meant that winter was on its way, and I’d be blissfully dreaming that the rain on my window was snowflakes up on the hill. My cocoon of ignorance was uninterrupted because dial-up internet was waaaay too slow for live webcams to actually work, and the computer at my parents’ house was always one virus away from going molten.

This brings me to the topic of this week’s Soapbox: THE INTERNET. This mystical web of digital information floating in space is ruining our damn lives. I’m watching a very cold rain fall in mid-October and I’m pissed about it. Why am I pissed? Well it may have something to do with that “I’ve got to shit, take me out now” look my dog is giving me, but it also has to do with the damned internet. Like many of you, I’ve been watching edits of brats fortunate enough to have parents rich enough to send them away to summer ski camp in the midst of the Great Recession all summer. This creates a false sense of what we used to call “winter” throughout the year. We used to have to wait until fall to get the new ski videos on VHS (or DVD if you were rich), and by that time we were ready for some winter stoke. The tape would come in the mail and by the time I’d gotten sick of it, the snow was about ready to fall. I’d jump on my dial-up shitbox and wait for my home hill’s webpage to announce that they were opening. That was the extent of it.

Now I’m subjected to pictures (screw you Chris) and video from Loveland, Boreal, A-Basin, and even the East Coast’s own Sunday River has joined the fray. I can see the smiling faces, and they’re not even the blurry kind that you get with a massive tube monitor. I’m talking HD plasma smiling faces, drenched in Colorado sunshine or Maine fog and shadow. I’m forced to be aware of the weather in parts of the country so remote they’re accessible only by a $99 Southwest Airlines flight. I know that it’s dumping in Tahoe and there’s a natural 4” on the ground in northern New England. I know what the park setup is and what trails are open at mountains I’ll never go to, but what does this knowledge get me? Nothing. Thanks a lot internet.

Be strong my friends, winter’s coming.