I want to overthrow the hegemony of the sun. I drink the champagne of Oregon rain from a vermiculated black bottle. Through my wanderings in rain, I found possibilities. In the sun, I found none. It is easy to be a saint in rain and avoid the darkness on the edge of town where it never rains. Rain is born to run, the sun born to sit in a soft chair. Was I born to rain? I typically get the blues whenever the sun shines brightly and never write much of consequence in the summer. No bluesman has ever written a song lamenting the appearance of the sun. Rain is wanton, exciting, the sun constant, boring. Rain gallivants, the sun merely beams. Rain inebriates, the sun makes you drowsy. Rain ruins guns, the sun keeps powder dry. Rain invites prestidigitation, the sun casts mere shadows. I never require gadgets in rain, especially digital ones; I reject all gadgets as potential keys to understanding rain’s splendor. I have never owned a rain gauge and never will. There is no map of rain; the sun is a cartographer’s dream. It rained a million years for the oceans to form. Prometheus stole fire from the gods. Who stole rain? No one. Rain was an anonymous gift. The sun compels people to pay for gimcrack gifts and dangerous indoor tans. Rain pays you a good Gothic pallor. I once taught a high school student on the Oregon Coast who earned a full ride scholarship as a cheerleader to Oregon State University. She was told she would have to tan. She gave up the scholarship. Rain plays chess and solitaire with you at the same time. The sun plays no games. Rain sets up spontaneous stages for unrehearsed performances. Rain never has to justify its appearance. Rain brings mountains down to the sea. The sun can’t do that. Rain stimulates involuntarily while the sun willfully anesthetizes. There is no such crass commercial creation as a rain influencer; they are a dime a dozen for the sun. Rain exudes perpetual ruth; the sun often shines ruthlessly. True, cataclysmic floods can result from an overabundance of rain, but floods are inevitable, necessary and reminders of human limitations and arrogance. Rain generally abates pestilence while the sun often abets it. Rain is the rank outsider, the sun a cozy lobbyist. My favorite hobby is to peruse rain. Rain is an essay, the sun a tome. Developers despise rain; they love the sun. After a rainstorm, all the colors are true, not RGB. Alfred Stieglitz photographed rain better than anyone except for every photography student I ever taught at Newport High School. Occasionally, rain encourages you to remain indoors and have sex, as opposed to the sun, which nags you into mowing the lawn. Who would you rather hang out with? Someone playing hooky from work because of the sun or rain? Rain is a bindle, the sun carry-on luggage. You can slide in rain. You can smear rain, but never touch the sun. Rain sluices gold. Rain foments serenity. Rain launches sedition against conformity. Rain sends roots deep; the sun desiccates. The sun speaks in monologues while rain always dialogues. Rain is aural and visual and has body, the sun can’t possibly compete with that Triple Crown. Only genuine awakening results during encounters with rain. The sun? Mostly relaxation or trying to forget. All my great notions manifest in rain. All my mediocre ones emerge with the sun. We can thank capitalism for making the word “acid” an obscene adjective of rain. The Hindu religion has a rain god. Noah’s 40 days and 40 nights is a richer story than Joshua’s sun standing still. What are the semiotics of rain? Is it a symbol for transparency or solidity? Earlier, I switched on Save Me Jesus Radio and a crooner crooned a maudlin “thank you” to God for taking him out of rain. The implication was that Satan lurked there. God I hope so! If I find him, we’ll get right down to it. The terrain of rain is unknown, probably unsteady. It can, however, be surveiled and reconnoitered. I wish I could paint rain. Rain lubricates the organic machine and pedals the water cycle. Rain apprehends and distributes. Rain kneads wounds. I read a thousand ancient Japanese haikus with a hundred mentions of rain but none of them truly captured the essence of rain here on the Oregon Coast, which makes perfect sense because the haiku masters who wrote them had never experienced our rain. Rain transmits everything and sexless, umbrella-wielding people transmit nothing. Rust never sleeps at the Oregon Coast. Mold either. Rain is the ultimate in evolution and revolution. I will die by walking into the ocean and return to land one day in a form of precipitation. I hope to fall as sleet. Rain is action, action is consolatory. Rain insists upon important psychic initiative, the sun delays it. Rain never gives you the whatever. Occasionally, rain makes requests of me. I never see them coming but I always comply. Why do people vilipend rain? Even corporations need rain. Threat of rain culls the weaklings. Rain strops those who walk into it. Rain is sly, subtle, the sun obvious, bombastic. Rain is a rich language of nuance, the sun a monotone monologue. Football is always more memorably played in rain. In eighth grade, I nearly drowned on a football field by recovering a fourth-quarter fumble in a muddy end zone full of a half dozen opposing players flailing in two feet of water. Technically, I was waterboarded by my enemy in pursuit of paydirt. Tennis is also more memorably played in rain. In high school, I loved playing tennis in Oregon rain, and because the season unfolded in the perennially wet spring, we played most of our matches during some form of precipitation. I was a master of slick courts and could float a drop shot dead in a puddle or hit a slice forehand up the line that skidded so low to the ground it was unreturnable. In tennis, when the sun shines, the better player usually wins. When it rains, the more eccentric human being always does. In my youth, my father scored his only hole-in-one on a 180-yard par 3, in the gray teeth of an Oregon City rainstorm. I was with playing with him. He hit a 4-iron that landed in a lake that was the green and the ball floated downstream into the cup. It was quite possibly the greatest golf ace in the history of the sport. With rain, the word “divine” becomes an adjective, and better yet, a verb. I have divined many of life’s most important intentions in rain. Using an umbrella is like turning off the light before sex.Rain does not abide coiffed hairdos. Indeed, it relishes destroying them. Rain is democratic, the sun a hierarchy. None of the cruel, paternal, monotheistic religions ever originated where it rains a lot. They sprung from men, deserts, heat, grievances. Rain foments, rain forgives. The static sun feels like a judge and jury. America is not a nation of rain and it is intestate, forlorn. What would happen to our country if we elected a President who hailed from the Oregon Coast who knew rain, loved it? There has never been a rain man or woman in the White House because they never run for office. The traveler found Ozymandias in a desert, not a conifer rain forest. Humans have renounced their sensual connection to the earth. Walking in rain is the strait of return. Rain is mystery, the sun obvious. Rain is sonic, the sun silent. It can rain cats and dogs but rain is dogs and the sun is cats. I love the smell of wet dogs in the morning—it smells like victory. Portland once had a professional football team and its mascot was rain. I want an Oregon artist to design a deck of rain trading cards. The sun is indifferent, torpid, while rain pervades, incites. The sun glints, rain splinters. Rain meanders, the sun stays put. Rain is incipient; the sun is the end. Rain effaces, the sun blinds. Rain is a semi colon, the sun a period. Rain doesn’t need an article to introduce itself in a sentence, the sun does. Reflections generated from rain are the most beautifully mirrored images in the world. You can’t listen to the sun or moon. They are mere celestial factotums. Look at their precise orbits. I must admit that rain is perilous to the homeless. There is no getting around it. I once stood three feet away from a homeless woman verging on hypothermia because of unrelenting rain and could do nothing except wish for rain to stop falling, a first in my life. It did not stop. Rain is never precise. I’d rather fall in love with a woman of rain, not a woman of the sun or moon, but of course, rain isn’t for everyone as I have discovered. A woman of the sun broke my heart. I once watched a woman wearing nothing but a macrame top stand outside in a rainstorm at midnight. Why did I blow it with her? I also blew it with a woman who had the word rain tattooed on her arm, in a cursive script from my hand. Rain portends nothing. It means everything. Rain suffuses and infuses, the sun dries and delaminates. Raiment is almost the perfect ancient and mellifluous noun of rain. What a sensation to have rain slung at you from a black cloud of a slingshot! I case the Promised Land when I walk in rain. I want to be the Perry Mason, Harriet Tubman, Gale Sayers and Portia of rain. Rain drops mercy, the sun delivers punishment. Seven or eight years ago, I lived in a 24-foot, 42-year-old RV mostly made from steel and aluminum. The RV rested in a disheveled RV park on the Southern Oregon Coast. One November, over a 72-hour period, it rained a record 12 inches. Rain never stopped, day and night. I didn’t leave the RV. I couldn’t read, listen to music. watch a show, or even sleep because the overpowering and ever changing sound of rain walloping the RV precluded all these activities. I didn’t speak a single word. I was able to write, however. During those 72 hours, I wrote the second greatest book about rain in the history of world literature, although I never wrote a word on paper. It was all written in my mind, where it remains. Many might see those 72 hours trapped inside a RV listening to nothing but rain as prison. On the contrary, I felt it the most psychically liberating experience of my entire life, and interestingly enough, the most silent.