There it was, on a bright winter day, hanging in a dusty, cobwebbed window of a garage: a large disk, red as the setting sun, hovering before me like a revelation, like a Dickensian vision of Christmas Past. What I saw in that window was as much a memory as an actual object; a childhood memory of skimming wildly down snow-covered hills, unable to steer, unable to stop, totally at the mercy of momentum and gravity. And laughing, laughing in absolute delight.

There was, it seemed to me, something of the Sublime about that snow disk. It was a physical manifestation of the abandonment of the Self, of giving in to the natural world. It was flawless in design, pure in purpose; it was perfection in red plastic.

It was the Holy Snow Disk.