Get the Hell Outta Dodge

Thanks. I really needed that.

Occasionally, you may get the feeling that someone - someone you can't see or hear - is trying to send you a message.

Perhaps every time you go to take a shower, without fail, five minutes into the shower the water randomly turns ice cold, causing you to Janet Leigh your way onto the floor, curtains strewn over your naked body.

It might be that someone keeps leaving the garbage shoot door open, and so your floor always smells like all the things that everyone else in the building didn't want to keep. Probably cause they smell like shit. Or rotting fruit. Perhaps it is shit and rotting fruit. Who knows for sure?

Or, you just get rained on constantly, as though a perpetual dark cloud of depression has materialized into an actual storm cloud, putting you one up over Halle Berry in the actual changing of the weather. She's such a poser. Really.

For me, it's the latter. In the past three weeks, I've been hosed as many times by the Great One. And each time I got really wet. The first time I thought, Damn, I'm really wet. But it wasn't anything compared to the second time I was rained on. That was so wet. I couldn't get any wetter. There was no possible way I could retain any more water than I had.

Oh, but I was wrong. I was so wrong.

Having apparently pissed off God, I can only imagine that, up high on His cloud somewhere, he laughed when he saw me tuck away my iPod when it started to sprinkle - so as to be sure it wouldn't get wet.

He has no idea. I am so gonna punk this bitch.

Those were God's thoughts. I mean, that had to have been what he was thinking. It's what I would be thinking if I were about to drown someone in rains that seem to come both from above and below, perhaps from His in-ground sprinkler system.

But as I walked out of the PATH station, seeing the waters pour forth from the Heavens, I knew I was much more clever than He. I had my jacket. So I put my backpack on, and the jacket over the backpack; I tucked my phone into my pocket. And, slickly, I left my sunglasses on, so as to make people think I was a total badass. Because I really am a badass. No, wait ... if someone says, "You ass ... you're so bad," does that qualify a person for "badass" status? I think it should.

I walked out into the rain, thinking I had outwitted the Holy One.

HAHA, SUCKER!, I thought. I WIN!

Not a chance. Perhaps it's the Odysseus in me, but I can't help thinking I might be more powerful or wiser than the gods. However, I, like Odysseus, am not. In fact, God pissed on me just to prove it.

As I stepped into the lobby of our apartment building, I felt as though I were a sponge. I had absorbed most of the rain that had fallen in the tri-state area. Me, myself. I had. Just me. How was it that I was the only person who was completely soaked - and much moreso than I was the last time?

I think it might have been because I was the only person dumb enough to walk out in the rain, which, coincidentally, stopped just after I got to my apartment.

But standing in the elevator, I knew that I had lost. I was not getting any dryer, but the elevator carpet - newly installed, too - was beginning to pool up with water. I think the water actually came from me, I can't be certain, as I know I was certainly not any dryer.

Well, it's just water. No big deal, I thought, stepping out of the elevator. It was then that I knew someone, somewhere was trying to tell me I don't belong here.

Someone had left the garbage shoot door open and the entire floor smelled of diapers, rotten fruit and God only knows what else.

I was fairly certain that, as I opened the door to my apartment, I heard a chuckle, followed by a deep voice from the Heavens.

Get the hell outta Dodge, it spoke.