You know we can do it. We’ve got the science, we’ve got the machines, we’ve got that run away arrogance that leads us to believe we are mightier than any force in our world. It sounds like the kind of sinful exercise that might lead to something Irwin Allen would get an erection over, assuming Irwin Allen is still alive. But maybe, just maybe, it’s time we start manipulating our weather.

It’s a lurid thought, I understand. It’s just that I live in Maine and we’re all turning into mushrooms up here. Some folks have given in. They’ve sold their houses and now they live with their families on the sides of trees or on the forest floor. Because they’re mushrooms, you see.

Of the past 20 days in Maine, 17 have been rainy. Either a constant drizzle or an outright downpour, all day and all night long. The remaining three days were by no means salvation. They were merely cloudy and threatening, good for nothing at all.

You have to understand how Maine is, if you don’t currently live here. Our winters are six months long and brutal. We crave the arrival of spring like heroin junkies who go a long, long time between fixes. We need sunlight to snap us out of the insanity that comes with three hours of daylight and forty feet of snow between November and May. We need sunshine come June because we can’t drink 24 hours a day right around the calendar. We try but we just can’t do it.

So the best days of spring and summer – that golden time when the days stretch out unimaginably long as they march toward the solstice – have been washed away. We haven’t seen a blue sky in a week and that’s no exaggeration. The Fourth of July is a week away but our flesh is still the sickly white of January. We are so white, we glow.

So, I say start manipulating the goddamn weather and do it quickly.

Oh, we can do it alright. As recently as the 2008 Olympics, the Chinese fired more than 1,000 rain dispersal rockets into clouds that wanted to dump on the athletic fun and economic good times. Worked, too. Silver iodide, or some shit like that. I’m too lazy to look it up because my body is desperately low on vitamin D and I can barely stand up, let alone navigate to Wikipedia.

There are think tanks managed by the US military that do nothing but mull how we can monkey with meteorology – scientific hocus pocus to bring monsoons down on wartime enemies, to cripple their economies and demoralize their people. Or how about a drought to starve a population of people and spur them to revolt in a way that is beneficial to our own ambitions?

There is a remote area in Alaska where our government geeks are experimenting with things like extremely high and extremely low frequencies, electromagnetic generation, liquid mirror telescopes and all sorts of other things that buzz, crackle and zap to tweak the ionosphere and bring about changes to the local weather.

You can read about those things online. What you can’t read about is the secret stuff our government and others with equally sinister minds are doing in an attempt to control what has always controlled us. Master the climate and brother, you are God. You can crush economies, drive extinctions, cause icecaps to melt and relinquish the rich oil fields below. With control of the atmosphere, you could reshape an entire planet any way you see fit and direct the destiny of man where you want it to go.

But I don’t want anything big like that, myself, and I don’t wish to cause any problems. I just want to ride my motorcycle more than three days a month, can you dig? I want to spend a night in a tent and maybe see a star cluster before Halloween.

You can keep the deserts where they belong and let the polar bears continue roaming the ice. I just ask that you – Mr. High Frequency Active Aural Research Program or Mrs. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – steer the storm clouds away instead of allowing them to take up permanent residence. Send them to Canada, a belated thank you for all the arctic blasts they have sent our way. Yes, send the clouds to Canada and leave us in sunshine. I’ll sign the card myself.

With gratitude, love Maine.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 at 12:52 am and is filed under Etc.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.