Summer Storm (2015)

 

Walking home in the rain, on a Sunday afternoon.

A Thunderstorm Rolls In

Rain Clouds

 A slow, sleepy, summertime afternoon in the lower Hudson Valley.

The Vortex

Whoa! Check out those clouds, dude! Totally "Stairway to Heaven".

Lately, what with the common regularity of Doomsday predictions now fully realized and acted out daily on t.v. and in movies, we've become highly sensitized to news weather deliberately, in order to boost ratings through hooking viewers on the active creation of fear, which propels the vulnerable amongst us to tune in angst, seeking solace from those Doctors of Weather (called "Meteorologists") in some ritualistic pattern of fear followed by soothing comfort, the balm to our collective anxieties. Maybe news forecasters can wear big, peaked hats painted with stars, like some hammy old actor playing Nostradamus to the hilt, so we get the point more readily!

It's true, we did actively melt the polar ice caps due to our own selfish neglect, but that's hardly what one could classify as "new" (http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2014/05/as-we-know-it.html). What is new is our collective awareness of how that neglect has caused fires to rage uncontrolled, waters to overflow in streams, and tornadoes to rip through towns in increasing frequencies of violent intensity. There must be strong language to match!

More beautifully lit clouds. Gorgeous!

Enter the evil "Vortex", what was once dubbed the "Polar Vortex" in winter (to describe a fucking snowstorm, or a heavy downfall of snow once called a "blizzard", a common occurrence in the Northeastern U.S. and the Northern Hemisphere), now re-purposed for the summertime (with its pesky regularly occurring thunderstorms, also common in the Northeast) as simply, The Vortex, like some villain dressed in all-black from a mythical fairy tale fable.

I do understand the challenges behind selling something as banal as a heavy summer rainstorm, (because I'm a publishing professional, and selling something as simple as a good diet combined with regular exercise in book form must be fashioned anew with some fucked up gimmick, like the Neanderthals), and while I do understand it is hard to make that seem "new", I really don't fucking appreciate a thunderstorm artificially heightened to some weird new height as a fake movie villain (which, once again, is really weird, man, and you should totally know upfront that I'm on to you, so, enough already), because it's incredible as it is: a beautiful, and sometimes scary, act of nature.  
See it, and wonder.

After the cloud vortex, the sun sets beautifully.

Bravo! Another winning performance on Planet Earth! Shows over, folks.