I'm writing in the worst part of a blizzard.

What a satisfying, heroic way to start a newspaper column.

I'm not kidding, either. Here in Tiverton, Rhode Island, on the shores of Narragansett Bay, hard by the Massachusetts line, we've got more than 2 feet of snow on the ground, and we're supposed to end up with about 36 inches.

To cliche up, it's wet snow, heavy as lead, and the wind sounds like a freight train.

There's a driving ban. If you're not an "essential worker," you can't be on the roads. Mayors have pulled the plows off the roads because the drivers can't see through the blowing snow. In a nearby city of 100,000 people, only two legal marijuana stores remain open. The National Guard is on its way with front-end loaders and dump trucks.

This kind of weather is why the great Russian writers were so damn gloomy. You give me another week of this, and I'll be Dostoevsky.

There are several ways to write the "horrific act of nature" column.

You can always fall back on the "nature's fury makes me feel insignificant" column, but I've been married for 16 years, so I feel insignificant every day. I don't think anyone believes that kind of column anyway. If I've just discovered my own insignificance, why am I writing about how the storm makes ME feel?

I could exhaustively research and write a column about how a blizzard doesn't mean global warming is a hoax, and how weather isn't the same as climate, but most people wouldn't read all the way to the end of that column, and about 40% of you would just call me a communist.

There remains the "most vulnerable" column in which the writer centers on any group of beings who suffer the most in extreme weather. Feral cats. The homeless. Any half-bright writer can milk that until he's got a bucket of tears. If I did that, I'd go for the feral cats angle. People feel a lot worse for homeless cats than they do for homeless people.

A lot of cities open special shelters for the homeless during periods of intense cold or blizzards. The benefit to the reporter/columnist is you can find the homeless, or at least the less stubborn homeless. You go down to the shelter, and there they are, full of misery and quotes. If you can, find a homeless veteran. People feel worse for an Iraq War veteran who "turned to drugs" than they do for some clown who started using drugs in junior high and hasn't done anything since then but use drugs.

The feral cats are harder to find. They're dying under snow-caked shrubs, and "meow" is a lousy quote. If you could find a former military dog, one of those bomb-sniffers, and it was dying under a shrub, a whimper would be a hell of a good quote. If you ran a picture of the dog, and you set up a GoFundMe for the pooch, he'd be adopted and butt-deep in kibble by the end of the week.

A couple of days before the blizzard, my wife Deborah and I prepared. We used the traditional male/female division of labor: She went to the grocery store, I went to the liquor store. We ended up with a big bunch of groceries and a 30-pack of cheap beer.

Standing in line at the liquor store, the day before it hit, I was struck by my own insignificance in the face of nature's fury. No matter what kind of horrifying act of God was about to come out of the clouds, I still didn't have enough money to buy good beer, imported beer, craft beer.

It makes a man think.

We still have power in our house, even though tens of thousands of people in the state are without electricity. If the power goes out, and the outage lasts for several days, and my wife and I freeze to death, when they find us, I'm going to be clutching a can of beer that costs $20 for a 30-pack. That's less than a buck a can.

You don't know how big a failure you are until you're freezing to death under a shrub, being let into the emergency shelter or facing the cold wrath of God with a can of cheap beer in your hand.

To find out more about Marc Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Mean Old Liberal." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com, and for Nook, Kindle, and iBooks.

Photo credit: Josh Hild at Unsplash