Change in the Weather

There was a meteor shower in Taurus Wednesday night, I missed it. Too cloudy. I've been cloudy for days now, months, years. Being cloudy is not the same as being in a fog. Albeit I've been known to go about with zero visibility for long periods of time, occasionally the sun breaks through and the mist dispels.

Not so with cloudiness.

The Election has broken through like a heatwave, however, and I can see clearly now, for the time being. I woke up this morning feeling a little bit less loaded. With the cares of the world, that is. Thanks to my country doing the right thing for a change. Good Christ, I actually said "my country." Last time I said that was in second grade, singing "Tis of Thee" for Miss Hessler at the top of my lungs in hopes of getting first dibs on a Tootsie Pop.

I've always been a sucker for anything with a surprise in the middle.

My mother used to disperse clouds. I'd catch her standing beside the sheets on the clothesline in the backyard staring up at the sky, I'd know she was at it again. I'm not sure what exactly she was aiming for by engaging in this activity, only that she believed she'd be able to do it on a regular basis if she just concentrated hard enough.

My mother also read tea leaves, dreamed prophetic dreams and played Table Up. I remember the sound of the card table legs tapping steadily on the rec room linoleum, sometimes with great force. She played with two special friends, her "book club," she called them, though to my knowledge no books were ever read. Mostly they asked questions of the universe and practiced communal cloud dispersal.

Maybe a few of those dispersed clouds somehow found their way into me. Which would explain a lot.

Due to my cloudiness, I sometimes miss the simplest things. Take the Housekeeper, for instance, whom I've referred to elsewhere in these pages.

I try to steer clear of the Housekeeper, but sometimes it's unavoidable. It is, after all, my house she's keeping. It should have been clear to me that the Housekeeper has obviously been pissed off about something lately, because books and magazines have been turned onto their faces again, and the framed picture of the Dalai Lama is getting mighty dusty. Then last week, while trying to sneak out the back door, I ran smack into her on the stairs. She took out her ear plugs as a prelude to conversation, so I smiled and wished her a Happy Halloween.

Big mistake.

Halloween is, after all, a pagan celebration, which is why it's my favorite holiday. But the Housekeeper, you may recall, is a Fundamentalist Christian, right down to the marrow of her intelligently-designed bones, a fact that temporarily slipped my cloudy mind. I endured her muttered "You can keep that to yourself!" before hightailing it, only to return home later to find that my skeleton earrings and collection of cardboard death masks had been turned over, along with the Vanity Fairs and Peoples.

I should have known better. It's the clouds, stupid.

Now that I think of it, the Housekeeper is probably pissed off about The Election. And about the fact that, due to the economy being in the crapper, she's stuck keeping house for this leftist socialist feminist incense-burning pot-smoking anti-American vegetarian pagan wino Democrat, whose tomatoes were bigger than hers this year. Talk about God's indifference.

As for me, you can have God, I'll take a meteor shower any day. This last one, the cloudy one in Taurus, was that like God sending a postcard? Like maybe a comment about The Election? Like, "Yo, assholes! Now that's what I mean by Free Will!"

The Housekeeper probably thinks God has abandoned us. As for me, I'm with Michelle Obama, I've never been prouder of my country. Oops, I said it again.