As everyone who lives in Florda knows, its been raining lately. A lot. It can be a cheerfully sunny day when suddenly, off in the distance, you hear an ominous rumble. Then before you know it a huge black cloud will come boiling overhead and will let loose a torrent of rain. Nice a pleasant sprinkle, not something you want to skip down the side walk in while singing, but big fat drops the size of gumballs that feel like they are not so much as falling on you as they were hurtled at you in anger. Then the big black cloud moves on to vent it's anger somewhere else and it becomes hot and muggy out.
Yesterday one such storm blew through. I did not realize it was coming because I sit in a cube in a window-less office basking in a fluorescent glow with mood-music pumping in my ears via headphones. Thus it was not until I got up sometime later that I peered out the break room window and saw the storm outside unleashing its brutal fury into my car's open window. I yelped and dashed out into the rain and lightning to roll up my windows, but it was too late, the damage was done.
I drove home that night, my ass wet from the soaked seat. There is something annoyingly uncomfortable about a wet ass, I think it's a throw back from the diaper-days. There were small puddles on the floor of my car, and a couple of paperback novels that I have read but not yet taken out of the car soaked up an alarming amount of rain water and swelled up to the size of phone books.
I should have done something about it when I got home, but instead I went inside and changed into some dry pants and promptly forgot about it. This morning when I went out to go to work I opened the car door and a wet must odor drifted up and met my nose. The car seats were still wet and the swollen soggy books looked like something I would not touch with a stick. Annoyed, I slammed the door and took my JunkTruck to work.
However, I now cannot stop thinking about my car. I think about it sitting in my driveway, the windows up and a greenhouse effect taking place inside. If I had rolled down the windows to dry during the day, another storm would have rolled through. That is just how my luck works. Now I have a feeling that when I get home there is going to be fat mushrooms growing in it. Not nice friendly mushrooms either, but some odious Bavarian green-tinged toadstool whose spores are known to cause brain warts. Tonight I am going to have to pick up a bucket of damp-rid (that stuff is neat) and find a way to explode a can of Lysol in there like a bug bomb.
In other news, I got a letter in the mail last night ordering me to report for Jury Duty at the end of the month. Most people hate Jury Duty, however I was thrilled. Jury Duty is no hassle for me because the courthouse is just a few blocks away. I would probably just ride my bike over to it. And it means a day that I do not have to go to work. Sure, I have to sit in that little jury-duty room that is actually a portable. And yes, whenever someone takes a shit in there the whole little room smells like their farts, but for me it's not so bad. I'll just stretch out, bring some snacks, read my book and think about how I do not have to be at work.
2026 Update
Dialing up 2007, where Ed's grand dilemma is a car interior becoming an accidental rainforest and jury duty as a vacation.
Ah, 2007: a lost age when a Floridian could discover his car had been baptized by storm simply by sitting down in a puddle and yelping. In 2026, your phone would have pinged you with a hyperlocal rain warning before the first drop fell, and your car would probably text you that the window is open, because everything nags now. Ed’s paperbacks swelled into phone books; these days he’d lose the same story to the cloud, then pay a monthly fee to read it back on a glass slab. The jury-duty portable still smells like a foot, I’m sure, but the snacks and paperbacks have been replaced by people silently charging their phones and pretending not to breathe. I also cherish that he had a backup vehicle called JunkTruck and a car he punished by slamming its door; modern cars just scold you with an alert, robbing you of the joy of discovering your own mushroom terrarium.
“2007 Ed, after discovering the paperback-shaped tumors and slamming the car door, why did you choose to 'promptly forget' instead of grabbing a towel—did you really think the damp-rid and Lysol would be enough to keep your car from turning into a Bavarian brain-wart farm?” — Beelzebubba the Third
2007 Ed: So, Beelzebubba, you're asking why I chose to "promptly forget" instead of grabbing a towel? Well, first off, I was wearing dry pants by then, and dry pants have a way of making wet-car problems feel like someone else's disaster. Also, I am a champion of postponement, and my brain apparently filed that whole soggy mess under "future Ed's problem." Future Ed is a lot of things, but he is rarely prepared. As for damp-rid and Lysol being enough? Probably not, no. I fully expect to open that door tonight and find some kind of mushroom that's been taking notes from my landlord. But I couldn't just stand there and admit defeat, not when there was a perfectly good bucket of moisture-eating crystals and a spray can of chemical warfare waiting at the store. It's optimistic, really. Stupid, but optimistic. Also, jury duty is coming up, so I've got bigger fish to fry—like the smug satisfaction of not being at work.
