This weather saps my strength, makes 2 p.m. feel like time to get up, 3 p.m. feel like time to go to bed, nighttime feel like the only natural hours. Steady rain, steady rain, days and days of steady rain. I’m expecting parrots to fly across the streets and giant, bird-eating spiders to catch them in their webs. I’m expecting trees to sprout up like mushrooms everywhere, leaves the size of beach umbrellas overlapping, turning the sky to a thick, dark green. This city is a rain forest, steamy humidity, rivers running in the roads, sun forgotten. I’m expecting little naked men with blow dart guns hiding behind lampposts hunting lizards the size of taxicabs. I’m expecting schools of piranha to flow along the gutters, devouring the ankles of people foolish enough to cross the street. I’m expecting millipedes that really do have a million legs to crawl across my pillow. I’m starting to believe in 40 days and 40 nights, and hope the man building the next arc is of strong-hearted genes. My eyes are drooping, my brain is smudging all of my thoughts, my coffee made me tired. There is no hope! Whoa! Rain, forgive me my sorrow at your presence! I love you, I do! And sky, please don’t tell the rain I’m asking… but won’t you please show me that beautiful face of the sun? Please! Will you undrown me? Will you wake me up and let me live again? Oh, rain, rain, go away. Come on back some other day.

There’s a lot of terrifying things that can happen to a firefighter, but little as terrifying as what happened the other night to Tony Chemicals, and to which I guiltily say, Thank god it wasn’t me! The tones went off and Squad 18 jumped to action. Tony Chemicals ran for his bunker gear, stepped into his boots, pulled up his pants, and realized uncomfortably that there was something under his foot. For a split second he considered if he had time to remove the object, and decided it would drive him crazy if he didn’t. As the rig pullled out, his pants went down, his foot came up and his fingers found what he said felt like a wad of cottonballs. It wasn’t cottonballs. It was a squashed mouse who had chosen the boot of a two hundred and twenty pound man to take a nap in. Now, that’s terrifying. We were talking about it the next night in the kitchen, and I said something to the effect of, “Man, that’s terrifying! Thank god it wasn’t me!” To which DiBenedetto replied, “If it was you you would have screamed like a woman, Naviasky. You wouldn’t even step on the roach that time.” He was talking about the night a giant cockroach snuck up behind me in the kitchen and almost devoured me alive. “He jumped right up on the f—ing table and screamed like a girl!” (Thanks DiBenedetto, but I swear that part’s not true.) Hey, I ain’t crazy. I remember in high school when David Levi who was tough and strong and the best athlete in Randallstown came in one morning and told me that the night before he was taking out the trash in his socks and he accidentally stepped on a frog. He said he cried. Well, if a smashed frog could make David Levi cry, what would the shell-crunching feeling of a cat-sized cockroach under my shoe do to me? I’m a little bit tough, but I ain’t larger than life. So when I think about Tony Chemicals and the flattened mouse, I laugh. But still I have to say, Thank god it wasn’t me!