Rain is Goth

People hate rain. Stuck inside, they peer longingly out the window at the drizzle and the drip. They complain about the rain, even though they know their complaints are futile. Rain gifts them a fecund mood of apprehension, dread and anxiety, the raw materials to whittle some twig into a magnum opus, invent the next iteration of calculus, or at least nail a haunting baseline, but instead they writhe fruitlessly. They don knitwear, sip tea and sit by the fire, morosely insisting that they are cozy, as if they’ve been cast in bronze live and sealed inside of an Instagram image.

People hate rain so much that they migrate by the millions to regions with less of it. They gush about mild weather. They throw open their sliding glass doors pretentiously and fall all over themselves donning loose-fitting outfits, guzzling wines that are massively infused with sunshine and gorging on figs like Iberian swine. They lay around in the sun rolling back and forth and flap their jaws about vitamin synthesis. They look down their noses at the soggy goblins left behind in the wet regions, loudly exclaiming that clear skies make them feel positive. When they accept rain, they only do so for starkly utilitarian reasons, because it is “necessary for life.” Then they wanly mention how lovely the wildflowers are, or how they like wild mushrooms, while looking at their phones. In their hearts, they hate rain, and if they had their ways it would be banished entirely to another region from which they could pipe in water to irrigate in a controlled manner.

But their hate is feeble compared to rain’s hate. Rain is Goth. It pours its scorn from heaven on the skulls of the sun-belt set, sending their preposterous patios crashing into the canyons and flooding their towns with tons of cold, filthy sewage.

People prefer snow to rain. Children squeal and frolic in the snow, tricking the naive into harboring sympathetic feelings for it. But people who prefer snow to rain are mistaken. Snow has its place. It is not for lack of spirit that it fails to triumph rain. Snow possesses a blinding visual aspect and an even more merciless killer instinct than rain, trapping the unlucky, burying and freezing them. As a decorative art, snow is acceptable for a short time after touchdown, before it is plowed or tousled. But snow is clean, bright, and crisp. Rain is sullen, amorphous, edgier and more adversarial than snow. Snow may be cold. But rain is hard. Snow slowly drifts or swirls towards the ground. Rain drums and beats. Snow piles up in pillow-like drifts. Rain runs downhill fanatically, ripping the earth apart and destroying things. Snow is fun to play in. Rain is too cruel to play, even though it does provide good puddles to splash.

The best rains are not the warm, comfortable deluges that a gecko watches with preternatural stillness from a tree branch, but those further towards the poles, where they can combine forces with their cousin, cold wind. Rain with wind drives. It pierces. It produces a severe, biting, bracing effect. A fierce wind-driven rain bites the skin and inflames it. The body longs to return to the fetid bathwater of the womb, but rain splashes a bucket of cold rain on its face and slaps it abusively until it smarts and swells. Cold, windy rain is a master with a chip on its shoulder and it debases us under its spiteful torrent.

Rain, and the gloomy skies it issues from, produce the world’s finest landscapes: brooding landscapes of thick, mysterious and hostile vegetation filled with slimy animals such as salamanders that hibernate in a bewildered state under fermenting muck. It produces novels of oppressive length filled with unsympathetic, bent-out-of-shape characters hopelessly at odds with existence. Rain produces cloudy pools in which frogs croak on huge, lurid floating leaves and bubbles of methane belch forth. It produces tempestuous, turgid rivers dangerous to approach. Mountains crash down under the blow of rain. Rain stamps out fires and leaves their coals swirling in mud. Rain crushes the fur of possums, rats and dogs into musty mats, clammy, cold, and waterlogged. Wet chilly mammals tremble in the rain. Rain sees an insipid parade, some moronic procession of boosters celebrating, and pisses on it.

Incessant rain rots everything. It shoots through wood with its humid corruption and cloaks stone in swollen, dripping mosses. Clouds that totally obscure the sun produce an effect of diffuse light, bleak and murky, and when the beams of sun break through they dapple this wet landscape to produce hallucinatory rainbows and revelatory highlights. Rain promotes depression intermingled with fits of mania.

In California, after nine months of tedious, agreeable weather, the winter promises chaos. The ocean grows dark and mean. Rain swirls up from the sea and lashes out. Proud mansions slide from their pompous perches. Trees are shredded and their remains scattered around like piles of bones. Everyone suffers when it rains. The coziest among us suffer, miserably humiliated, obliterated.

But some of us love it when mother nature spanks us. We bow down before our queen, the misanthropic tyrant rain. We turn our cheek and accept our flogging. We need her, because we need a dour downpour to smother our vanity. And she needs us, because what a hater needs most of all is something to hate.