When it comes to weather forecasts, I’m a minimalist. I just want the facts. I don’t think opinions are called for, and I don’t want dumb advice. I don’t need to hear that it’s going to be “another beautiful day” when we’ve had five thousand sunny days in a row and my garden looks like streusel.

Also, I can figure out what to wear if it’s going to be cold. All by myself.

Last week the forecast here was “Windy with occasional rain; gusty winds can blow around unsecured objects and decorations.” Why, sure, I suppose they can. It was close to Halloween. They usually have little icons next to the forecast, like the curly lines representing wind. Maybe they should double down and show ghouls and goblins flying through the air so we really get the picture. If it’s not going to be quite so windy, they could depict fast-food containers piling up at the curb. You see a house-tilting-into-the-sky icon, it’s time to get in your bathtub and hold on. Sustained winds up to 140 mph is clearly too tough to parse—some of us need visuals.

Our weather events aren’t too dire most of the time. This is a temperate zone. Usually not too hot, not too cold, although things are changing. About the worst we get is wind and rain and the possibility of a power outage from trees falling on the lines. They could depict that with a plain black screen. Any time the consecutive rainy days dribble past thirty, they can feature a bottle of antidepressants or a razor blade.

I’ll tell you what, though. What really messes us up here is ice. Ice really has it in for Portland. Most of your cooler places in the country just skip right past ice. They just go straight to powdery snow at zero Fahrenheit. It’s peaceful and quiet and the only sound heard is the occasional clunk of someone’s ass falling off. But here, sometimes our temperatures toggle right around freezing and nothing sets up—it’s not going to snow and it’s not going to rain, it’s just going to hang out and cause buckets of trouble for days on end. We are completely undone by ice. Maybe Portland is overly delicate. But we are certifiably screwed when ice invades, and we are smart enough to know it. Hobnail boots would be the ticket for such an event, but there’s been a run on them lately.

Maybe they’ll have extra verbiage for the incoming ice storm. Strong possibility of ice. Care should be taken around any slippery slope. Anything not secured will slide away: civil rights, habeus corpus, due process, freedom of assembly, freedom of speech. Expect branches of government to break. In the worst case, the ship of state may go full Shackleton.

In the event of ice-caused power outage, rely on each other. That is where your true power lies.

Yeah, that’s a lot to depict in one little weather icon. Maybe they could just reuse the flying ghouls and goblins. Or a swastika.

As the man said, it don’t take a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

And all this? This blows.