The Cryogenic Preservation of an Antipodean Cartoonist

The meteorologists are calling it a "Bomb Cyclone." I call it getting mugged by the wind.

January 31, 2026
New York, NY

There’s a particular temperature at which the human soul decides to leave the body and wait it out ‘til May. According to my weather app, New York City arrived at that temperature on Tuesday.

This weekend, the East River might completely freeze over for the first time in 100 years. They’ve cancelled the ferries. They cancelled breathing outdoors.

The meteorologists on the TV are breathlessly calling it an “historic polar vortex” or “bomb cyclone”. I call it “a personal attack on my face.” Walking Morris in the morning isn’t so much a stroll as a scene from The Terror. The wind finds the one millimetre of exposed skin between my scarf and my beanie and inserts an icicle directly into my ancestral memory.

This thermal violence is particularly rude because mere weeks ago, I was in Perth, Western Australia, being sautéed by a sun that has no respect for my milky pale skin. Now, I’m mummified in my puffy coat, being flash-frozen like a bag of peas.

I spent most of that Perth trip cosplaying a Salvador Dalí clock. I didn’t walk down the street; I poured myself down it. I was a puddle of SPF 50 and sweat, oozing over the melting bitumen.

I arrived back at JFK, stepped onto the curb, and my body went into immediate shock. My bones rattled like a bag of cheap cutlery. I went to the gym to take a cold plunge just to thaw out.

My first winter in NYC had me irrationally furious at air. I used to trudge around, slipping in black ice, and squelching through soggy puddles of bin water, vomiting expletives only understood in a dead language.

The deception takes a while to get used to. I look out my studio window and see a bright, cloudless blue sky. “It looks lovely!” my antipodean brain says, because my brain is a dirty, dirty, fool. Then I step outside, and the wind thwacks me in the forehead like a snow shovel.

First NYC winter, circa 2014

Shuffling along the street yesterday, I encountered a scene that felt like a warning from a dystopian future. A massive, yellow Caterpillar front-end loader (the kind designed to laugh in the face of blizzards) had been completely vanquished. It looked less like a parked vehicle and more like a tomb. I stopped and squinted at the cab, genuinely worried that I might see the driver frozen inside, preserved perfectly like a mammoth.

I sat down to draw a cartoon about this, but my hand was shaking so much that the ink looked like a seismograph during an earthquake. I am currently wrapped around my radiator pipe like a python. I have accepted defeat.

If anyone needs me before May, don't.

your pal,