Rain

Rain, rain, rain, rain, rain.

The rain in Spain falls mainly in the plain. The rain in Virginia also falls mainly in the flat tidal saltwater flats of this peninsula I live on and has been for the past week. I spent 2 1/2 hours in my car during a thunderstorm watching people who should be out driving. . .driving and wrecking. . .and waiting for large tow trucks and police to arrive and carry them away. I feel like I'm in Seattle or England, where they (They in this case refers to the 1,001 books I've read by British authors who always mention the rain) say it always rains. Actually, I've never read (to my knowledge) an author from Seattle. I've been there. And it rained the entire two days. Which I thought explained why all the buildings are gray. But most metal skyscrapers are gray. I'm talking to myself. (Conversing really.) I do this a lot since I live alone on a peninsula with a swamp on one side, the Atlantic on the other, and criss-crossed by hundreds of roads.

Car accidents: You never want to be in one but you always want to see one. This is because humans are twisted fallen creatures and usually bored from working in a cubicle all day. People don't want to see just an accident...oh no gentle readers...they want to see blood, and mangled metal, a bumper flung 50 feet away and sticking in the earth like stonehenge. They want to see a fat woman with too much make-up with Big Mac and fries breath crying and screaming into a cell phone. They want to see shattered glass all over the highway. If they have to drive slowly off the road to maneuver around the car parts then so much the better. We live in a society of gawkers. We love to gawk.

Another thing people want to see is snakes. Everyone hates snakes, but we all want to see them. Every human on the planet has a good snake story to tell. Take a room of complete strangers from all the continents who hardly speak the same language and have absolutely nothing in common. One person mentions this snake they saw, and almost stepped on, and soon the party's going on strong with snake speech. It's amazing.

And have you ever met someone who saw a bear in the wild. That's all they talk about for 6 months. They may forget their wife's birthday, but they'll ALWAYS remember the day they "saw that thar bear in the woods."

And how do they usually begin their bear-talk? Like this.

"At first, I'd thought it was a dog."

People ALWAYS think bears are dogs at first. Probably somebody has written a thesis on this topic and earned a PhD on this very subject. And why do they always think bears are at first dogs??? It's complicated to be sure, but it mostlikely needs a lot of math to explain.