It's Raining, It's Pouring, The Old Man's Not Snoring

May 2003

[Now that this piece is archived, I should explain it was written after two straight months of daily downpours, not what you'd call typical weather for the Jersey Shore.]

We had one heck of a scare here on the East Coast last week. For several minutes, the clouds parted and a giant yellow fireball illuminated the entire sky. Trees, buildings, and people were all bathed aglow in the strange, bright light. I feared it was Armageddon, or maybe aliens from another planet. However, my wife explained it was something called "the sun." She assured me it was perfectly natural, and while I couldn't recall this phenomenon before, she told me of stories of this "sun" shining through the clouds on a regular basis.

I wanted to research this further. I did a thousand random phone surveys to see if others remembered the existence of some flaming sun flying through the sky. Unfortunately, I did the surveys at 3:00 in the morning, so the results broke down like this:

• "No" - 2.5%
• "Yes" - 3.1%
• "You again! Wake me up one more time and I'm calling the cops!" - 94.4%

Clearly, more scientific data was needed, so I forced myself to watch 37 straight hours of The Weather Channel. This gave me some amazing discoveries! (Among them, sleep deprivation causes paranoid delusions.) Time was, the local weather would indeed vary daily from sunny to windy, from warm to cold. I can't remember that long ago, but if it's on cable, it must be true.

We've had so much rainfall here lately, I suspect the entire East Coast was secretly smuggled to Seattle without our knowledge. I keep fighting the urge to root for the Seahawks, open a coffee shop, and join a grunge rock band. So you can understand my alarm.

According to the calendar, we Jersey Shore residents should be slathering each other in SPF 2,000,000 right about now. Instead, night temperatures have reached freezing, and we've had enough rainfall to make stockholders in the Totes company do cartwheels.

During my research with The Weather Channel, I learned this is just another stage of the area's year-long history of severe weather. We had the drought and high temps of last summer, the enormous amount of snowfall last winter, and now all this wet stuff come spring. The nice weather lady calmed me down and explained this is all just part of nature, and there was nothing to worry about. (At least I thought she was explaining it to me. It might've been the sleep deprivation thing again.)

Or is it something else? Could it be something more nefarious out there that is keeping us under record-long rainclouds? I have a theory. Ted Turner is trying to one-up his cable rivals at The Weather Channel by going right to the source and buying out Mother Nature. Now he's "improving" the climate similar to his stab at professional wrestling. "More exciting than ordinary weather, it's the new and improved XTREME WEATHER (tm)! Experience rainstorms longer than Noah's Flood! Heat waves hot enough to fry an egg...inside your fridge! Snowstorms colder than the dark side of Hoth!"

I just hope the subscription fees will be low; I don't want to commute to my day job by rowboat.

LEGAL STUFF: All content copyright © 1996-2006 Daniel O'Leary. All rights reserved. No unauthorized duplication, publication, or distribution.

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He has previously written online editorials to NJ-shout.com (RIP), Great Society.org, and Songsource.com, among others. He has also been featured in ShoreGuide and AbsoluteWrite.com.

Dan is a current member of the NetWits humorist's collective.

Since his early twenties, Dan's writings have also been prominently featured on the refrigerator in his parents' home. "Sure, they make no sense," Mrs. O'Leary comments, "but we're proud of him -- no matter what everyone else says."