Mother Nature’s cat keeps walking across the keyboard

WTF is up with this weather?

Yes, Minnesotans, I’ve been home for less than two weeks and I’m already complaining about the weather. A new record.

I didn’t even think about a weather report while I was abroad for four and a half years. Now I scrutinize forecasts daily, dissecting and highlighting all the parts where the meteorologist was wrong. Which is always lately. And I can’t even blame them much. With these new, freaky, end-of-the-world weather patterns, who could possibly predict this stuff?

Every day these morning news weather schmucks get on the air, standing in their courtyard, open-air weather set, holding a ludicrously wide umbrella, armed with a forecast that someone probably spent half the night analyzing, calculating and compiling and the instant they open their mouths bleating about how it’s going to storm all day, the sun breaks through and shines for the next ten hours. And vice versa. It’s like trying to predict how bad a fart will smell.

I don’t mean to exclude those of you outside Minnesota. The fact is, if you can’t talk about the weather here, you can’t talk. It’s the supreme equalizer. You’d think that a businessman, a skater punk, a cheerleader and hobo standing at a bus stop would have nothing to talk about, but that’s the beauty of Minnesota. They do have something to talk about. The weather. And they will because we are fixated. We don’t even say ‘hi’ in Minnesota. We cut straight to ‘WTF is up with this weather?’ We actually say the letters ‘W’, ‘T’ and ‘F’, because this is the Mid-West.

We’re getting crazy storms where it sounds as if someone is running the thunder through a wah-wah pedal, bizarre, otherworldly cloud cover rippling over the city at high speed, raining when it’s sunny, not raining when lightning is cracking overhead, 90 degrees one day, 40 degrees the next… And this is October!

This is not right. Even for Minnesota. I’m genuinely scared. I know the polar ice caps are melting and the ozone layer is receding and apparently these developments need further study and consideration before we do anything rash like finally putting those cars into production that they invented in the 50s that run on coffee grounds and bad breath, but even so, this kind of weather is not happening in Europe. Record hot summers, yes, Bingo Weather Systems, no.

Is this ca-ca happening anywhere else?