Rain and I have a love-hate relationship, and by that I mean that I hate it and it clearly loves me so much it wants to follow me around all the time like a duckling that imprinted on the wrong mom. Everywhere I go, there it is – Providence to New York to Portland and back. And when I go indoors, escaping its reach, cutting off its access to me, does it get bored and leave me alone? No, no, my friends. It waits outside, banging on the window, reminding me it’s there to walk me home.
It’s not the wetness that bothers me. Everybody knows that what goes wet must come dry. But rain makes me sad. There’s a reason rain clouds have become a cliché metaphor for depression, and that reason is that rain! Is! Depressing! Everything gets worse in the rain – traffic slows down, you have to put on more clothes, the world literally gets darker. Everybody wants to talk about the rain, inflating its ego, getting on my nerves. “Is it still sunny out?” asked nobody ever when leaving a building or seeing somebody else enter. The moment you have to brace yourself for a particular kind of weather, that should be your first sign that maybe it’s not the happiest type of weather.
And to add insult to injury, it was raining all summer. S-U-M-M-E-R, which as we all know stands for Sequence Uv Many Months Eliminating Rain. Summer, the only time of year I’m free to bask in the sunshine all day, loses much of its value when there’s no sunshine to bask in. Am I supposed to bask in the rain? No way. Rain just doesn’t give you that same tingling feeling of knowing that you’re slowly being fried alive. And don’t even get me started on that whole mindfuck of ‘it’s raining but it’s still hot out.’ That doesn’t work! It shouldn’t work! I mean, it technically works, but only in the way that if you were playing rock-paper-scissors with diamond scissors, scissors would beat rock, but everybody knows it doesn’t work that way!!!
And if nothing else, consider this on a serious note. These past couple weeks, people have been losing their homes and lives due to the ferocious, bloodthirsty beast known as precipitation. The sun, on the other hand, has never flooded or drowned anyone. Additionally, the sun, whose main thing is fire, has never set anybody’s house aflame. You know who does that shit? Lightning. You know where lightning comes from? Rain clouds. This just goes to show that rain causes all varieties of natural disaster. Meanwhile, my beautiful precious baby sun would never hurt a fly. Not to be confused with my beautiful precious baby son, who would hurt anything and everything that crosses his path. I’m a little worried about him. But not as worried as I am about that cloud approaching.
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