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2006-05-13 - 3:19 p.m.
Nobody likes rain, I guess. Except morbid goths who revel in the gray skies and bleakness of it all.
I started disliking rain especially after my disastrous experience at Kettle Moraine State Forest. It was a twenty-five mile hike with my Boy Scout troop. It rained steadily the entire time and I wasn't prepared. I threw away my poncho after it snagged on a branch and tore asunder. The temperature was in the fifties, and that combined with being soaked to the skin eventually lead to hypothermia.
If you have to die, I recommend dying of exposure, or freezing to death. Once the shivering stops, you just don't give a shit. All you want to do is go to sleep. And if you don't have any annoying friends around prodding you to "keep walking", and waking you up, it should be a nice gentle passing over.
Where was i? Oh yeah, rain.
I guess I never noticed the weather in May before Jenny's murder. But I sure do now. Day after day of bleak grayness. Long wretched days of endless rainfall. The damp cold that seeps into your bones, chilling you to your core. Blustery winds that exacerbate the cold and wet.
It's not the straightforward extremes of winter and summer. Not the freezing cold of winter where the cold bites into your exposed flesh. No, it's just cold enough to sap you of your body heat over time. Just cold enough to be annoying. It doesn't bite your flesh, it gnaws. It insinuates itself into your joints, making old wounds ache.
The rain though, it's the rain that gets me. It's the dogged, seemingly ceaseless, downfall. Not the thunderstorms of summer with their violent theatrics. No booming thunder and flashing lightning. Not the outrageous downpours that last ten minutes and are followed up with a rainbow.
No, the May rain is a steady, soaking drizzle that goes on for hours as you lay in your shelter listening to its steady gurgle and drip through the gutters, or the patter on the roof.
God help you if you're not the chirpiest of persons. This is the weather that will find that chink in your emotional armor and exploit it, turning plain old sadness into abject misery.
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So, how do you like them apples?