rain, foam, and soapy water

One morning in Austin I was on my way to work when it started raining.  Dang I should probably have taken my umbrella.  And then it started raining harder and then harder still, and eventually I ended up on some stranger's front porch.  The guy came up to the window and stared at me, and I shrugged and gestured towards the rain coming down in sheets and he walked back into his house.  Well a thunderstorm I thought, they pour hard for maybe ten minutes and then they are down to sprinkles and sometimes the clouds part, and sometimes there is even a rainbow.  But ten minutes passed and it was coming down harder than ever.  I walked back home and the sidewalk was ankle deep in water with a strong current.  It wasn't a hurricane, but Houston had had one and this was what was left of it when it washed up the shore.

I'm trying to follow what is happening in Austin now.  I remember when I first moved there there were this big bridges above these tiny trickles of streams way down in the gully.  Geez I thought what  a waste of space, why don't they fill it in.  After the first big rain I realized why they let those little trickles roam free.  I remember seeing photos of Austin in times past when the Colorado River somewhat regularly overflowed its banks.  Now it's all dammed up, but you know, water, like even us great apes, has to follow the law of gravity.


Weird shit is indeed going on.  Just a year ago, maybe a little more, politics was like Newtonian physics.  The laws were clear, every action had an equal and opposite reaction.  The reps and dems were like opposing magnetic poles and we knew how to read their waves.  Some pundit would explain something on my beloved Sunday shows, and I would sit back and think spot on and then things would unfold they way they were expected to.

But now it is more like a quantum foam.  Worse than a quantum foam, we don't know what exactly a quantum foam is, but we know how it works, this current political shit, I don't think anybody knows how it works. I wrote that analysis about Trumpism yesterday, and I thought it out as hard as I could, but in the end, I had to shrug, or maybe something else.  I could well be wrong.  Who knows?  Nobody that's who.


Some of the cars of the chrome and fin era were butt ugly, but I prefer that to the bland unspotted Lady Bugs that prowl the streets today.  I'm glad Old Dog noticed that you don't see people in the alleys and driveways washing their cars anymore. because this hadn't occurred to me.  Now that I think about it I miss it.  All that splashing and soap and leaning over at odd angles, kind of sexy.  Whatever happened to bikini car washes?