Life & Wisdom Quote by Steven Brust

Minneapolis gets distilled into municipal slapstick: not winter versus summer, but two species of civic inconvenience. Steven Brust’s line works because it reframes “season” (a word that usually carries romance, nostalgia, at least the illusion of nature’s rhythm) as a bureaucratic work order. “Road Removal” suggests the streets aren’t merely damaged; they’re erased, as if potholes and freeze-thaw cycles have the authority to repossess infrastructure. Then “Snow Repair” flips the normal relationship between storm and city. You don’t plow snow; you “repair” it, like snow is the broken thing that needs fixing, or like the act of clearing it is so constant it becomes maintenance on the weather itself.

The joke is local, but the subtext is widely legible: living in a harsh-climate city means your calendar is dictated less by holidays than by coping systems. Brust doesn’t say “it’s cold” or “the winters are long.” He points at the shared, weary intimacy residents have with public works - orange cones as state flowers, lane closures as community events, the annual faith that this time the patch will hold.

As a genre writer with a dry streak, Brust also sneaks in a world-building move: Minneapolis becomes a setting with its own rules, where the natural and the man-made are locked in a permanent negotiation. It’s affectionate complaint, the kind of line you only make about a place you’ve lived in long enough to stop pretending it’s temporary.