Raining, overcast. This city doesn't do partly cloudy, it does partly overcast. Right now it's completely overcasting, and raining. Not so much rain as drizzle. Drizzle with an attitude problem. Drizzle with an inferiority complex. Drizzle trying to impress people from places where rain is actually rain.

Cold? Is 43 degrees cold? Not if you're from here. If you're from here, it's just another day in winter. If you're from Michigan it's balmy. If you're from San Diego it's a winter nightmare. If you're from here it's a hoody and a flannel, but then so is 41 degrees, and 49 degrees.

A bit of wind. Just enough. If you're walking with it, you don't notice it at all, and if you're walking against it, it's irritating. In Kansas it's no wind at all. But that's Kansas. They don't drink as much coffee in Kansas as we do here.

Better get off my ass. Better put on my hoody and my flannel. Better go for a walk. Being nearly 50 sucks. But it's not so bad. It's actually pretty good in this kind of weather. It really sucks when it's warm enough outside to dress like you're in your twenties. I haven't been in my twenties since I was in my early thirties.

I think I'll walk by the nearby highschool. It's not that far away. I usually eschew it's streets because I don't want those kids looking at me. But today, who knows. Maybe some lonely girl will see me and it will make how sad she is feel good. Maybe she'll write a poem about the old man she saw stomping through the drizzle.

Headphones under his hoody.
A gray sky over his head.
What's he listening to in the drizzle.
80s music. The Cure.
It's cold and miserable in London too.

I'm listening to Breaking Benjamin, actually. If I don't, if I listen to something poppy or aggressive or happy or deep, in this weather, my phone acts weird. Breaking Benjamin, Seether, Three Days Grace, Skillet, Monster Magnet. Pandora picks these for me. Pandora goes to weather.com, and decides these are the bands I need to hear.

I trudge. Don't laugh. My Costco sweatpants, hoody and flannel, and old pair of Nikes. They used to be running shoes, but now they're sneakers. And soaked. This weather. Up this block, past these houses. A dog barks, but from inside his house. He's barking, trying to tell me there's really no point to this. To the walking I ask? No, to this weather, he says.

But maybe there is. There's the school. Now, do I keep my hands out, swinging, a purposeful stride? Or do I stuff them in my pockets, hunch. The girl in the classroom, listening to a lecture about native Americans from somewhere around here. Did native American teenagers from somewhere around here ever dream of steamy classrooms where a lonely girl sat vigil for a middle-aged man trudging through the drizzle? No, not likely.

Turn left at the corner. This side of highschool has fewer windows. Fewer students writing poetry about lonely figures in the rain.

Someday
I'll be that old
If this lecture doesn't kill me first.
Maybe the drizzle lectures him
Get a job, it says.
It sucks to be homeless in the rain.
It sucks to be homeless in the sunshine, too.
Everything sucks in the rain.

Jokes on her; I'm not homeless. When I'm done with this walk, I'll go back to my home. I'll take a hot shower, have an irish coffee, dry out, then another irish coffee, light on the coffee, heavy on the irish.

Then I'll write all this down. Will it be any good? Of course not. Everything sucks in the rain.