It’s been raining a lot lately.

I know that’s how the poem goes and everything, but in the meantime it can sure be a pain in the butt for the rest of us who don’t even like flowers! They didn’t really think about that when they wrote the poem, now did they? They were so focused on their flowers that they never stopped to think that maybe there were some of us who don’t really care for flowers all that much, or maybe we’re kind of indifferent to flowers, but if given the choice between having a few flowers to look at in May and not getting completely drenched in April, well I think it’s safe to say that you can guess where my vote would be cast…

Nonetheless, I kind of just have to suck it up not because I have little or no control over the rain itself (…although I am still a little bitter about that…), but more so because even after these so-called “April Showers” have come and gone, we’ve still got “The Rainy Season” here in lovely Florida which means that between the months of May and October, you can pretty much set your watch on the fact that it will rain between three and four o’clock each day. Of course, also during this timeframe is the slightly worse possibility that a hurricane could happen on any given day, so I suppose if given the option between the two I should lean more towards water falling from the sky as opposed to water falling from the sky, then sideways, then thrown back up at the sky, all the while accompanied by palm trees and Buicks and so on and so forth.

It may be the lesser of two totally incomparable evils, but it doesn’t mean that I have to like it!

So this year in preparation for this ghastly season, I went out and did something that I haven’t done in a long time – I cohersed somebody into buying a raincoat for me. Well, in all reality the somebody was my girlfriend and if you were to ask her, she would probably tell you that she wasn’t as much cohersed into buying me the raincoat as she offered to buy me the raincoat so she wouldn’t have to listen to me whine all night about being cold and wet. You know, how I got the raincoat is actually pretty inconsequential anyways – what’s important is that now I have it and already I’m wondering how I managed to survive three previous rainy seasons without such a gift.

Actually, I’m really wondering how stupid I was to endure three previous rainy seasons without said raincoat, but … well, errr … let’s move on!

Now that I think of it, I probably just carried around an umbrella and figured that that would be good enough to ward off God’s tears for a few measly months each year, but we all know just how effective umbrellas can be when a healthy gust of wind sprouts up! One minute you’re walking around downtown, looking all cool and dry, and the next thing you know you’re in a completely different part of town with frazzled hair and an inside-out umbrella – it’s kind of like Mary Poppins’ taxi service, except that Mary Poppins never had a taxi service and even if she did, you really had no reason for her to take you to the other side of town at this time of day! Not to mention she’s probably going to want a tip and you don’t have any singles on you – talk about a real mess…

In all seriousness, though, I would guess the reason for the umbrella rather than the raincoat in the past may have had something to do with, dare I say it – looking cool. And I know, I’m not exactly the first person who you think of when you’re defining the word cool (Tom Cruise is, right?), but that’s just all the more reason why the last thing I needed to be doing was further reducing my coolness factor with a big, bulky raincoat. Nope – instead it was just me and my umbrella, and although I may have been half wet from the knees down, man did I almost look cool!

Nowadays, though, I’ve more or less come to terms with the fact that I’ll never truly be cool, which is why I have no problems breaking down and donning my new raincoat when there’s the slightest look of rain in the clouds. Because the way I see it, I may not be able to look cool in my new raincoat when standing alongside someone not wearing a raincoat, but the difference is this – when we get inside and I take off my raincoat, I’m dry, whereas the cool guy, as cool as he may be, is now actually at right for hypothermia because he’s quickly changing from cool to just plain cold!

So while I may not be cool, let us not forget that I can still gloat like it’s nobody’s business, so I say bring on the rainy season, and the thunderstorm season, and pretty much any other season that calls for precipitation falling out of the sky – with my new raincoat, I can take them all on, or at least the minimal amount that I need to take them on between my house and the car! From there it officially becomes the car’s problem, but that’s a story for another day…