Jump in the mud, get yourself filthy
An ode to the sloppiest season
Contrary to what you might have heard on cable news or your neighborhood Facebook group, violent crime in America has been plummeting in recent years. But if there’s any time of the year to keep an eye over your shoulder or resist the urge to flip off a crazy driver on the interstate, it’s April. For reasons that continue to elude us, April is when a lot of people seem to indulge their most aggressive and homicidal desires. It’s such a distinctive and recurrent pattern that some criminologists refer to April as “The Killing Season.” Assaults and murders occur more frequently during the beginning of spring, whether it’s a terrorist attack like the Oklahoma City bombing, or a state-sponsored event like the 1993 Waco siege, which was carried out by law enforcement officials.
It’s worth noting that April starts with something much less distressing; April Fool’s Day. A dedicated day for mercilessly pranking your friends, family, or coworkers can make for some hearty guffawing But it also offers a release—after a long winter of being sequestered away indoors with all our thoughts and feelings. That isolation pushes millions of us into a dark place. So when it’s suddenly warmer and sunnny enough to go outside again, a lot of re-emerge from our homes with wild hair, feral eyes, and a posture that brings to mind a reanimated corpse. Winter’s demons still have their claws in us. Ideally, we can shake them off by switching someone’s coffee sugar with iodized salt and having a laugh when they start gagging. But I suspect the ravages of winter also inspire more destructive actions—the type that Fox News loves.
So this week, I’d like to offer a more passive idea for processing all of those lingering feelings from the darkest months of the year. It doesn’t involve doing anything mean or deceptive, and you can do it alone or in the company of friends. As long as you live in a town or city where the landscape is undergoing a thaw process, you’re all set. My go-to trick for mentally adjusting from winter to spring is a simple three-step process.