Glub glub glub

Friends.

If there were any other way, I would choose it, and gladly. But some things are fated. Predetermined. Colored with inevitability. They have the taint of the sure-to-come.

By the time you read this, I may already be gone.

This isn't a suicide note. You can tell because it is boring and stupid. If I were writing a suicide note, you'd fucking know it. Knowing it would be the last thing I ever wrote, there'd be no holding back. The metaphors would support the analogies, spun together in a fine mesh web of gossamer prose wafted on the butterfly-wing breezes of lyricism and wit. Also there would be more blocks of quoted song lyrics, probably by Pink. What can I say, she speaks the secret language of my soul.

While I have no intention of offing myself, I do live in Southern California, which has to at least count as a retardation of the Darwinian instinct for survival. This state is constantly trying to shake us off, sometimes literally. Whatever natural catastrophe finally does us in, we certainly couldn't reasonably argue that we didn't see it coming.

The latest ABSOLUTE CATACLYSMIC INEVITABLE ESCHATOLOGICAL CATACLYSM OF DOOM isn't the usual suspects of earthquake, wildfire, mudslides or state legislature budget negotiations. This time, it's only a Biblical drowning in a river that falls out of the sky.

Really, they're calling it an "atmospheric river." It seems hyperbolic, but not when you consider it next to the description of the confluence of storms deluging us "at the same rate as 50 Mississippis". That's more like the California I know. Rain is what happens when homo indie filmmakers can't afford a halfway competent cinematographer and try to cheat by adding fake, wet, concrete-darkening "atmosphere" to their movies about feelings and shit. This is SoCal. If we're going to do death-by-rain, we're going to do Michael Fucking Bay. Believe it.

And just to keep things in perspective, the scientists studying this phenomenon (remember, these are the SCIENTISTS) refer to this as the "ARkStorm." Just like that, with the fucked-up mix of caps and small letters, like the name of a shitty minor league baseball team texted by a 14-year-old.

I get why they're going big with the the talk, though. We're Californians. You have to try really, really hard to scare us anymore. The gang violence didn't get me. The crack epidemic didn't get me. The shark attacks, the child-snatching rampages, the elderly drivers, the smog, global warming, Mexicans, firestorms, earthquake after earthquake after earthquake... and look, still here. Well, not all of us. But we replace the ones actually killed by that stuff faster than we can bury them. Every successful movie with a no-name star sends at least 100 deluded people here just over the opening weekend. I think 40 Year Old Virgin raised the population of Culver City by about 600 all by itself.

We're not all the smartest ones ever, sure. And will the earthquakes get us eventually? Sure they will. Hell, even this Deathstorm thing happened before in like 1861. This apparently didn't count because there weren't any white folks living here at the time. But also it got us in 1969 and again in 1986. Man, I remember 1986. It's hard to forget the day everyone in the state was wiped out by a river from the sky.