I’ve never completed a marathon, but I imagine it’s running without the luxury of choice - one can’t pause for a quick cappuccino or afternoon film matinee.

Exhausted and bedraggled, one is driven to complete the activity due to the pressures of publicly expressed determination, earnest self-promise and significant financial investment.

Plus the fact that new technologies allow friends at home to follow your progress on their phones and “cheer you on” from their living rooms, where they are undoubtedly having brunch, including those toasty little brioche things you like so much and that jam that they know is your absolute favorite.

So one relentlessly must press on. Until you cross that finish line, there is no freedom; only willpower, intention, and the stamina required to continue forward motion.

Yeah. The last two weeks of Winter are like that for me.

The last two weeks of Winter are not Spring.

They Are Winter, which this year has been impressive in its old-school authenticity; sub-zero temperatures, feet of snow covering yards of black ice, the works.

Plus, this weekend, the United States enters Daylight Savings Time, when all clocks must be set grimly forward in a dismal ritual of temporal larceny.

“But you’ll get that hour back!” you say. “In November! You get to sleep an extra hour!”

Do not mind my scowl. It is not for you. I’m just blaming the messenger, and you’re right, this year I get an extra hour of Halloween Night. And it’s on a Saturday. Wonderful.

But I need that hour now. My watch is scolding me for not sleeping correctly - it gives me a numerical health score every morning, the current sum of which is an average so distasteful to the device that it has stopped encouraging me with exclamatory phrases like “Let’s try getting to bed earlier!” , and now only offers terse, stern statements:

“Your time awake last night had an impact on your very low sleep score. Make adjustments to improve it.”

It’s like an A.I. parent-teacher conference.

I’ve enjoyed the soups. And the stews and the extra blankets and those weird wool socks that I should be allergic to but somehow am not. I’ve enjoyed wearing my snow boots because they make me ever so slightly taller but outside I still feel like a giant. I liked the cookies and crocheting snood scarves and the stars on clear nights.

I’m not a hater, by any means (make certain that Snow Mizer knows that). Winter is great.

I’m just tired. It has nothing to do with anything inside my apartment, but there’s these leaks where dread and mayhem blow in through these screens on our walls and desks and laps and wrists.

I’ve lived long enough in Brooklyn to effectively ignore the sounds of planes, trains, and the engines, brakes, and enhanced stereo systems of most automobiles - but inside my head is a sub-audible grind of the news updates and pull-quotes I either cannot avoid or feel irresponsible ignoring.

And that’s what keeps me awake at night, which of course is worse when the nights are very, very long.

Even my sweaters are tired. My favorite used to do that thing where I could push the sleeves up and they’d stay above my elbow. Now they “flomph!” down to over my wrists unless I hold my arms tight at my sides. Washing dishes, I look like a cozy suburban homemaker Tyrannosaurus-Rex.

And the days are getting longer, but do I need more Bright Cold? Powder blue mornings where all light filters through precipitation? I’d love to apply an anticipatory optimism to the situation – lie on my back on the frozen grass to see what shapes the endless cloud cover is making… Look! There’s a large wool blanket! Look! There’s an IMAX movie screen!

Ok, ok, it’s only 14 days from now: then birds’ll tweet and pollen will float and the weight of my work slacks will be appropriate for the weather again. In 14 days we replace the snowmen on the bookshelf with bunnies and eggs.

In Spring, we engage all the plans that we made in Winter. In deference to the slumber scrutiny imposed on me by my magical timepiece, my chief plan is a series of elegant naps, and resuming my long walks at lunchtime.

Oh, my watch’ll love that! Maybe it’ll raise my grade point average.

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