#20 Stop Raining
May 1st, 2008 by doing better
This advice is directed at the weather. More than two days of rain in a row are too much. We don’t like getting wet when we are riding our bike to the library because our jeans stay wet for hours, and then we get pneumonia and die, and the city turns into a ghost town, and there is no one to stock the supermarket shelves or take the children to school. Yet another apocalypse, alas. It is nice to have less traffic on the streets, though.
Yes, yes, we do have waterproof trousers, but we forget them.
If only the wicked weather would make an effort to be more ingratiating, we would not complain about it so much.
We live with the weather, and it hits us in the face. It subjects every one of us to atrocious domestic abuse. It freezes us and drowns us and blows us over. It numbs our fingers and ruins our makeup.
Its tantrums come without warning, followed by the sulks. Then come times of unexpected placidity, and we become complacent before the next violent fit strikes without warning to annihilate our picnics and our wedding day.
The weather is dreadfully vain, always needing to be the center of attention in every conversation. To this end, it floods neighborhoods, rips down power lines, shuts off the electricity and causes millions of dollars’ worth of damage and every conceivable kind of havoc.
It is two-faced, unreliable, always shifting and never learning its lesson. It loathes consistency.
It loves nothing more than to see us fussing with our umbrellas and raincoats, drying our faces and shivering under its tyranny. It loves the power it holds over us, but it is hopelessly immature. It has no compassion, no mercy on the poor and helpless who suffer most from its whims. If it were human, it would be an adulterous itinerant eternally-adolescent unemployed attention-deficit homicidal hippie.
What is the point of causing all this trouble? We ask you to answer that simple question. What, simply, is the point?
You see, we don’t care. We have roofs; we have walls. We have cars. We can shut you out! You are hurting yourself far more than you are hurting us. You are nothing like as important as you would have us believe. You will never prove anything to us, and we will never respect you. If you are trying to make us worship you and sacrifice goats to you, you are wasting your time, so just stop raining and have done with it.