The Pimp Hand of Precipitation

Rain, rain, and guess what? More F'ing rain! Yay!

I was six years old when my family packed up the Oldsmobile Country Squire and headed down to Los Angeles to visit our cousins. The trip left an indelible impression on me, though, not for the likely reasons.

I’d been raised in the back-ass-end of the East Bay. My family lived in a small town, complete with a single town drunk, weekly cattle drives, and plenty of locals who walked through town carrying shotguns, because that sort of thing was considered healthy recreation back then.

Given my rural roots, you might guess that my trip to urban Southern California was an eye opener because my cousins lived, hip deep in an urban smear that spanned one end of the horizon to the other. It was a world of .38 specials, mile-high afros and Parliament blaring from the windows of passing lowriders. It was, in fact, the polar opposite of the pick-up truck/Hank Williams world I’d been raised in and, yet, none of these obvious differences struck me as significant. Kids are funny that way. I was as flexible as Gumby and within hours I’d adapted to my cousins’ world of locked doors and smog.

The only thing that struck me as absolutely bizarre was the sight of my Aunt spraying down her driveway with a garden hose. Where I grew up, no one would have dreamed of using water that way. Wasting water when any sane person would have used a broom to clear off a driveway? It was unfathomable. Northern California had been in the grip of a severe drought for years now and that kind of wonton, willy-nilly waste of water was as unthinkable as a Pope in thong underwear.

Consider this: the drought was so bad that my family of seven used to take baths and then save the bathwater so that we could use it to flush our toilet—and that was only if there was something solid circlin’ around the porcelain God. Water was a precious thing—everyone in Northern California was under severe water rationing. The same wasn’t true in Southern California. Even when it began to rain again in the 1980s, I never really overcame the deep fear that one day the water would stop falling from the sky and we’d have to resort to sharing our bath water again and letting that which was yellow, mellow; flushing down only that which was brown (to paraphrase the old saying).

I guess that’s why I feel guilty whenever I look up at the sky and curse the rain—which happens pretty much every single day. I still live in Northern California, but now I live in the damp, moldy section of the state. Stuck right smack dab against Oregon and the middle of nowhere. Consequently, it rains here a lot. In fact, by the time March rolls around, I’ve got webbing between my toes, gills on my neck and a fungal infection circling my scrotum that just won’t quit. This is not exactly bliss.

It has rained just about every day since December. Oh, we had a two-week stretch of patchy sun in February that rekindled my faith in a benevolent God, but these past two weeks have been one long, bitter deluge. The toothless, old timey logger-types cackle that this is the wettest winter since `63. Redwoods and scotch pines are falling left and right --smashing homes and dearly-loved F-250s with a ruthless efficiency.

Sure, there are bigger things to be concerned with: my survivalist neighbor keeps quoting Mein Kampf and is amassing a stockpile of weapons that would have the UN a-running if they ever caught wind of it, Michael Jackson is still white and seems to be losing more of his face every day…there's plenty of stuff that keeps me staring at my bedroom wall into the wee hours. But when you ride to work every day on your bike and you know that every single day will entail pedaling through miles of mud and ice—grinding expensive components to paste in double time and generally hating every human who rides past in the comfort of a sealed automobile, well, it’s hard to put things in perspective. At least I can flush my toilets whenever I want to. I think I’ll do that right now...savor the flush.