Nobody really expects a knee-slapper legacy from a couple vicious storms. But the recent double gut punch to Florida thrown by dual hurricanes, during peak election and storm season, delivered one anyway.
Post-storm charges were immediately leveled by some of the nation’s prominent droolers, including addle-brained U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Mensa, that the government of the United States of America is “controlling the weather.”
Oh lordy.
Over a long journalism career, I’ve become well acquainted with the … how do we say this … broad U.S. Whacko Cohort that once was a minority group. Except now it verges on a majority of brown bananas in the bunch, thanks largely to the worst thing to plague humanity since the plague.
That would be social media, the digital and intellectual equivalent of crotch rot.
In my centuries as a reporter, I’ve answered my share of newsroom phone calls (kids: ask your grandparents) from random members of the Logically Challenged Brothers and Sisters of America. So I’ve heard just about all of the horse-puckey conspiracies:
That fake moon landing. Bigfoot (I repeat: Show me a dead one). People with personal accounts of um, conjugal relations with an entire tribe of bigfeet (not kidding, lady from Texas, who invited me to join in). Countless new D.B. Coopers! Various apparitions, ghosts and spirits. Alien abduction. CHEM TRAILS!!! Vaccine microchipping. The “stolen election” of 2020. The EATING OF DOGS, THE EATING OF CATS in Springfield, Ohio.
Let’s clear the air
And now we have the government in charge of the weather. This has been weighing on me for decades and I can put it to rest right now.
The weather is not, in fact, controlled by the government of the United States of America. I know this because it is controlled by me, Ron Judd.
It’s high time the American people finally learned the truth.
It started one day in my childhood when my late father took us all on a camping trip somewhere in the deep, dark woods, forcing us to reside in a moldy, cotton canvas tent and eat beans and franks by a smoky fire for days on end.
At some point, this so grated on me that I summoned my full, previously unknown weather-controlling powers, clenched my teeth and … voila! Instant atmospheric river, before anyone at the National Weather Service ever invented the inane term.
Long, wet story made shorter and drier — we fled the overflowing creeks and went home.
I liked this. A lot. It grew from there.
Honing my skills
Growing up, I learned to channel my weather interventions, expanding the range and impact from minor skirmishes to full-on, unexpected gulley washers, tornadoes, typhoons, killer blizzards, insane winds and yes, even permanent global climate change. The latter, it can now finally be revealed, got its start one day via a temper tantrum when I could not, for the life of me, find the keys to my sporty yellow 1967 Dodge Polara.
Countless times since, countless people have been inconvenienced, pushed to their limits, forced to flee to other locales and yes, even swept off the face of the Earth because of weather events caused not by natural conditions, but by what really amounted to just pissy moods from yours truly.
Sorry, not sorry.
Four strikeouts in a Little League Game? Hurricane Iniki. Watching my super-cool transistor radio slide off the top of my parents’ Ford Fairlane? Tornadoes swarming through Oklahoma. Getting dumped by a college girlfriend? All that snow, hahahahahahaha! that plagued the 1992 Apple Cup (sorry, Huskies).
It has continued in my more recent, stressful editor’s life, during which my ability to provoke cataclysmic weather events motivated by simple, sheer spite have unfortunately intensified.
Remember that unexpected rainstorm that swept through here unceremoniously in early September? Yup, that was me, assembling a side table ordered from Wayfair, thanks to that useless little Allen wrench and patented Easy-Strip Screws.
You get the point. You see the pattern. It is what it is.
Basically I am blameless
Don’t even start with demonizing me. I didn’t plan this, it just happened. Nobody comes into the world expecting to control the weather. But like everything else, someone has to do it.
And please note: My good moods also have benefits, to the point that I believe planetary balance has, until recently, been maintained.
All those pleasant, smokeless summer days? You’re welcome. That rainbow over Birch Bay on Thursday morning? Good breakfast day for me. The fact that Northwest Washington typically has among the least-severe weather in the U.S.? Happy to serve!
So what really matters is this: Now that it’s out there, let’s accept that weather patterns that affect our moods, but our very well-being and possible survival on this god-forsaken orbiting rock, are indeed part of a master plan.
That plan is mine alone.
I’ll spell it out for the dullards: It is in your best interests to please me, Ron Judd, at every opportunity.
It’s not necessary for anyone to appease me in untoward ways. Just don’t harsh my mellow. Ask yourself every day what you might do to make me uncranky.
Simple steps will help
Like, you know: Subscribe to the damn paper. Keep your flipping Subaru out of my paid parking spot. Keep your restaurant’s kitchen open past 8 p.m. on “school nights.” Outlaw pharmaceutical TV commercials. Make a 2-liter soda bottle that stands on its own. Build some new rest areas. Take five rows of seats out of every airplane. Oh: Also maybe end world hunger, suffering, disease and misery — all that stuff.
It’s really not that much to ask. And the alternative is … unimaginable.
This is not so much a warning as a flashing-yellow-light Alexa advisory: What once took significant energy and time is now just reflexive behavior. My control of the weather is complete, undeniable, unassailable and irreversible. I can basically do it in my spare time.
So there you go, MTG, et al. If you’re going to spread insane theories, at least get the source right. And as for the rest of you: It’s never too early to start doing things that will avoid ticking me off.
It’s a nice little planet you’ve got there. Be a shame if something happened to it. I’ve been pretty benevolent so far. But nothing lasts forever.
Ron Judd's column appears weekly; ronjudd@cascadiadaily.com; @roncjudd.
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