A compact meditation on the absurdity of overthinking, framed through the experience of a Florida rainstorm. What begins as a poetic insight quickly unravels into an internal debate between logic, lyricism, and pragmatism, a reflection on how we manufacture and dismantle meaning in real time.

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“Whomp thrush”

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The rhythm of mechanical arms pounds back and forth, desperately trying to keep glass clear from a storm’s deluge.

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“Whomp thrush”

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Eyes dart from the impressionistically smeared brake lights ahead to the wiper controls to visually confirm what the tactile limit of the knob already told me; they could not be turned up any faster.

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“Whomp thrush”

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Eyes back to the road, knuckles turning white. I hate driving in the rain. 

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“Whomp thrush”

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The rain. So dour. So frustrating. It makes me so desirous for the rays of the sun. 

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“Whomp thrush”

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But the rain… it brings water. Humans will die more quickly without water than they will without food or sleep, yet we complain when it falls from the sky.

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“Whomp screeeeee”

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And like that… the rain has stopped. Rubber blades scrape across a now dry windshield. I toggle the controls back to off before a second round of chalkboard groaning across glass. In the time-honored tradition of Florida weather sunbeams now break the clouds, the road ahead going from a rivulet to bone dry in the span of distance between two intersections. Freed from the stress of the storm my hands relaxed and mind wandered back to my epiphany.

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“Humans will die more quickly without water than they will without food or sleep, yet we complain when it falls from the sky.” My mind turned it over for a moment. Pithy. Profound. I’m a poet philosopher.

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Another thought pops immediately to counter and challenge the notion. “Rain is often a component of storm, it brings with it not only water but erosion, damage, and danger, and my initial reflection is obtuse. Rhetorical nonsense.”

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The argument continues as it forms, as if insulted by the oversimplification of the initial dramatic irony. “This is Florida, where rain floods, where rain kills, where a sudden cloudburst turns the act of getting home a dangerous dance of death between rubber roads, water, friction and physics.”

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The poet though, is not chastened. “The use of irony and poetic license to highlight the absurdity of human frustration with a natural abundance of what may be the most important life sustaining resource is justified to induce thought and self-reflection.”

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“Or self-pleasure,” comes back the logician. “You desire insightfulness in a twist of simple-minded irony to justify a personal validation of your own erudition.”  

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“Watch the road,” came a third voice. Simple. Direct. Probably reason. Or pragmatism. Whoever it was, they commanded more immediate attention as I applied the brakes at the next red light.

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 I exhale as I wait at the intersection. I’ll be home soon. It’s been a long day. I begin to turn over the argument in my head… in my head. 

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“Water is needed for life. It falls from the sky. Not unlike the Israelites and their manna from heaven. What if other needs for existence simply ‘fell from the sky’? How is that not… a miracle?”

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“What is a miracle but a view of positive phenomena that lacks a rational explanation? We’ve long since abandoned miracles.”

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Wait… wait… wait. Wait. Who are these… voices? No, too insane sounding. Personalities? Competing parts of my internal self? They are arguing from different viewpoints, and I am observing. 

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But wait, if I am observing them… where do “them” stop and “I” start? Why are they represented in dialogue with parentheses and I am not?

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Pragmatism. It was pragmatism who chimed in earlier at the red light, and it was pragmatism who had now guided me into my driveway, as if on auto pilot. And pragmatism would have to be ignored as I fell deeper into a crisis of identity and self. Pragmatism didn’t mind though, because so long as all the physiological systems were working within stable parameters, like the body’s mass not being suddenly crushed under a crumpled internal combustion engine, pragmatism had done it’s job.

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Pragmatism ignored, it piloted my body from car to home while the active participants of my mind sputtered and sparred. I had an epiphany and thought it profound, couldn’t I have just left it there? But maybe it wasn’t profound, it was cliché and dull, and certainly not the first time someone had that particular observation. There’s nothing new under the sun, after all. 

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Why is my mind doing this? Is this all just intellectual masturbation? What’s the point?

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The point… the point… the point is that if our minds were simple enough to be understood, we would be so simple that we could not. I had to appreciate the value in the epiphany, either insightful or insipid, and the sharp response of the internal critique, whether joyless or justified. Even if it was intellectual self-pleasure, where is the harm in a well-ordered mind?

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Finally I sit on the couch. Maybe these spiraling thoughts are why I’m so tired all the time. My laptop sits in front of me on the coffee table. I open it, click the MS Word icon, and type.

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“Whomp thrush”