Whole Foods stores are closing, the Zoo is closed, Metro may close above-ground stations — dogs and cats, living together!

How are people in the District responding to snomg 2009? With whimsy and denial! As the snowpocalypse falls in all its fluffy fury, those who would embrace its flurries are planning a celebration of absurdity and destruction. At 2 p.m., the adherents of chaos will assemble at 14th and U Streets NW for a guerrilla snowball throw-down. “He will win whose army is animated by the same spirit throughout all its ranks,” says the official snowball fight Twitter, because snowball fights need a Twitter account. Greet death, District: It might well take the form of loosely packed snow.

Everyone knows you don’t bring a shovel to a snowball fight. This makes me concerned for the safety of the people meeting at Busboys and Poets on 14th and V Streets NW at 3 p.m. to build a giant snowman. Will there be any snow left on the ground to be put toward the purpose of Art, after U Street’s snowy resources have been bent to military applications? Will the snowballers turn on the poor snow architects who arrive on the scene? Imagining the scene now before this melee takes shape, I recall the dark, still scene imagined by Rossetti:

In the bleak mid-winter
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter
Long ago.

Go out in safety. And may God have mercy on your snowball-throwing souls.