The Melody Of Summer (tf)
I like the sound of a nice summer rain too. I like to sit on my porch and watch and listen. One ear on the rain and the other on the sump pump in the basement, ’cause if I don’t hear that it means I’m gonna need a boat to get my books. Ironic that I live on the top of a hill and have to worry about my basement flooding, but such are the perils of water and gravity and living above strange things left over from the coal mining days. So yea, the biggest investment I’ll ever make in my entire life is largely protected by a small $100 machine I picked up at Lowe’s or Home Depot or one of those such wretched real-working-man places. All reliant, of course, on not losing power, which tends to happen during the worst rain storms. But so what? One must live on the edge I guess.
The pump is actually “made in Ireland”. I never saw anything outside of a sweater or a tweed hat that was made in Ireland, so I’m not sure how safe I feel. Sad but true that I’d feel more content if it was made in Cambodia. They seem to make everything in Cambodia. Nice that we stopped bombing them. I’d feel really bad otherwise.
It’s raining now, as a matter of fact. I just left my bunker and can see the drops slashed on the windows. Nothing serious though. Just enough to create steam and make me loathe summer all the more. Who brought up this wretched theme anyway? “Summer Rain”. Bah. Anything with the word “summer” in front of it makes me want to crawl into a hole with ice-packs. The only thing good about summer is ice cream with sprinkles, and even this is bad if you don’t want to turn into a fatty.
The only melody I hear in the summer is the whining of kids complaining that they don’t have anything to do. My first decision as ruler of the world would be to make kids go to school all year round. Not sure who came up with this idea of 3 months off, but it certainly wasn’t a parent with children utterly incapable of occupying themselves. It’s not like the children of the nation are in danger of being too smart already. Based on literacy-rate, we’re just slightly above Trinidad and Tobago and about 35 places behind Estonia, which I doubt any American kid could find on a map even if you spotted him the continent.
Not that finding Estonia on a map is going to make your life any easier. It’s just that there seems to be a lot of gaps in heads that spend 25% of their time receiving no stimulation at all, unless you flag hanging off the edge of couches upside down as a stimulant. And it does make you wonder why the fact that Estonia is so far ahead of the US in literacy rates is not a national scandal. But then again, this is the same nation where Michele Bachmann, a woman who wants to ban light bulbs and says God spoke to her directly, telling her to study tax law, is the Republican front-runner for the Presidency of the United States, which kinda obliterates the question entirely and makes you wonder how it is we’ve managed to out-read Trinidad and Tobago in the first place.
We should probably pay less attention to the rain unless we’re soaking our heads in it. Time to go back to school.
–Tom Flannery
Riding Both Rails 