Thunderstorms
I’m from Southern California, where thunderstorms occur about once a summer. I don’t know the exact stats, but I can only remember 2 or 3 summer storms growing up, and each one was a full on storm that would drench the region for a couple days.
Virginia is different. It seems like just about every day for the last month, just around commute time, ominous clouds would roll in from the West, peeking above the other skyscrapers until they blocked out the blue. And then they unleashed, raining like a watering can over flowers, thundering in anger and illuminating the late afternoon with lightning. Sometimes the rain would wash over the skyscrapers across the parking lot like a wave: walking by a window, you’d see a wall of water coming at you. It would hit the building with a force that would make the lights flicker. Invariably, as you mumble “oh shit” to your co-workers at the buckets being emptied on your windows, it’s as much because of the relentless force of the rain as the realization that you’d have to run out to the car in this – which is, of course, where your umbrella is sitting.
And, of course, it will pound the roads into gridlock the whole way home. It might stop just as you’re pulling into your driveway, or it might wait until you’ve made the mad dash inside to relent. On the rarest of occasions, it will continue on into the evening, rewarding your afternoon frustrations with an exciting lightning-filled evening show (which really is worth it).
No matter what, though, while it’s going, the rain is relentless. Huge drops, clustered closely together, pounding thunder – it all makes me think of “I Woke Up Today” by Port O’Brien.
Port O\’Brien – I Woke Up Today
The song is an assault on the day, on the understanding of the simple relationship between humans and their environs. Port O’Brien’s songwriters, Van Pierszalowski and Cambria Goodwin, write their songs separately: Pierszalowski from an Alaskan salmon, Goodwin from the Bay Area. The combination is a fragile, if walloping, examination of the human experience. Even when it’s being rained upon.
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