We Can't Find The Groundhog

This is an urgent message: we can’t find the groundhog. We’ve got about twelve hours left, and nobody’s seen the little guy since early last week. He could be anywhere. Check your cabinets, your backyards, your fire escapes—help us find this weird lil fella, or we’ll have no idea how much winter we’ve got left.

This may go without saying, but we aren’t just looking for any groundhog. We need to find the correct groundhog—the one we trust with the weather.

His name is Phil. Try calling out to him. He’s never responded to his name before, but you never know—today could be the day.

Go knock on some doors, ask around. Make tiny groundhog noises out the window. Tell your neighbors to be on high alert.

There is, of course, one possibility we have not yet reckoned with: Perhaps the groundhog does not want to be found.

We should desperately hope this is not the case. It would be an unthinkably disastrous potentiality with grave consequences.

You may be asking, “Who cares if we can’t find this strange dinky gerbil? What’s the worst that could happen?”

Well, we’ll tell you the worst that could happen: It’s just winter now, permanently. Forever. Pretty bad, right?

You see, most people think that the groundhog is just a fun little spectacle, and we all laugh about how it’ll be six more weeks of winter, or spring could come early—ha ha ha. Well, you’ll stop laughing when we tell you that without the groundhog being raised up above our heads and toward the sunlight once a year, we remain in permanent cold and darkness. For that is the true nature of Groundhog Day. It is why we dress in our Sunday best, top hats and cummerbunds aplenty—we understand the unspeakable outcome we avert with our ceremony every year since time immemorial when we appease the sun with proof that we still know where this rodent lives. We do not doubt the peril we would face were we to ever appear on the second of February sans groundhog. An indescribable suffering would befall this entire planet. A hell so deeply frightening that it is yet foreign to our own corrupt imaginations.

Oh! Almost forgot: groundhogs like to eat little chunks of grass. So if you have any you can sprinkle around for the cute little fella, that would be super helpful. Thanks!

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Behind the Writing

I’ll keep this short, since there’s not much to it today:

Tomorrow is Groundhog Day. It may not be particularly newsworthy or trenchant, but I always do a Groundhog Day post because I think it is one of the absolute weirdest, silliest traditions we have. Men in top hats, tuxedos, and overcoats try to get a rodent to tell us what the weather’s gonna be like. It’s so funny, which kind of makes it hard to write about—but not so difficult that I’ll ever stop.

Groundhog Day is completely detached from reality, and it’s for that reason I think we need way more days like Groundhog Day. But we can’t do that if the groundhog is missing. Please look everywhere and report back.

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New Chat!

I’ll be rolling out the Here’s Something subscriber chat tomorrow! It’ll be a conversation space in the Substack app that I set up exclusively for my subscribers, kind of like a group chat. Eventually, I’ll post short prompts, thoughts, and updates that come my way, and you can jump into the discussion. So keep an eye out for an email invite!

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That’s all for today—thanks, as always, for reading and supporting this newsletter. See you right here next week, or this Sunday if you decide to…