Truesday - TEArs Run Rings

Damn that was a weird sentence to type. Good thing this won’t be proofed.

Back to the rain.

The thing about the rain here is that it’s almost as if our ground has no idea what to do with it. Like birds and coconuts. Penguins and high-fives. Magnets and Juggalos. If our rain doesn’t have somewhere easy to park itself, like a downstream flood-friendly town of some kind, then it just rushes around breaking shit around whatever hapless area it pissed down on. A mindless, listless menace. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve come out to my street-parked vehicle in the morning to find what looks like a whole goddamn bail of hay, peppered with used diapers, wrapped around the most uphill tires. Obviously the work of a shit-river which, having no where else to wreck havoc, took over my street while I slept. Downhill from my crib is a cul-de-sac, and it’s always littered with the bodies of abandoned trashcans that migrated there with the flow of the mighty river Shit, open-mawed and appearing to aimlessly mill about along the far curb like plastic zombies, filling with hate-rain.

And no matter how many years I’ve lived here, or how lame a cliché it becomes, I will never understand why a little rain causes Austin drivers to switch their eyeballs off and start plowing into each- you know what? Doesn’t even matter. We Austin drivers are just plain shitty in adverse conditions. Rain, snow, dust storm, ACL, whatever. And just like getting a cut at Bird’s without a reservation, I just get tired of adding an unnecessary hour to what normally takes ten minutes.

But wait, there’s another angle.

[beat]

What if there were no more rain, ever, you ask? Well. Well, well, well.

1. I would never have to mow my goddamn lawn again
2. I would never have to buy any more windshield wipers
3. My blood would dry up within my body as I breathe
4. Mosquitoes would only be found in museums
5. SUP advertisements would stop showing up in my inbox
6. Oasis would be renamed “crappy restaurant by Hole Travis”
7. Toobing would be replaced with Drunken Creek-bed Hiking/fighting
8. Bicycling would no longer end with a line of dirt up my back
9. Fears of monster river alligator gar would wane
10. I would find something else to complain about

So it’s not like I’m a fan of NO rain, either. Or that I’m even a fan of a balance between cloud-soaked and sweat-soaked, per se, having never really experienced ceteris paribus. Perhaps it’s best to content oneself with the knowledge that at the very least, even though we are utterly helpless in terms of understanding the meaning (and utterly lazy in terms of effort to really try) we’re conveniently handed a name we can use when we curse the heavens, when we lambast what appears to be a chaotic beating by forces we cannot hope to understand, let alone suppress. That there are systems out there which will help us to focus our wandering, seething finger-pointing by supplying us a single human name which may be used for generations to come as a sad excuse for a lightning rod touchstone to encapsulate our confused misfortune.

Katrina. Valdez. St. Helens. Obama/BP/Hermine.