I'm Sorry, Ms. Jackson and I'm Sorry, Weather God

I Am Fo' Reeiyall

I’m not sure who said it first, but I know Outkast said it catchiest. Andre 3000 rapped it in their song, Ms. Jackson back in 2001.  I know what you’re thinking – hang on, Andre and his boys in Outkast spit a whole inventory of catchy material back in 2001 so what, specifically, are you talking about?  Allow me to clarificate.

The song was full of lines that snagged in your head like a fishing line in a thicket of cottonwoods.  For instance, everyone remembers, “I’m sorry Ms. Jackson, Ohh - I am for reeiyall,” and, “Forever.  Forever ever?  Forever ever ever?”

But the part of the song I dug hard on was the picnic/weather line; remember it?  “You can plan a pretty picnic but you cain’t predict the weather.” 

I know it’s supposed to be a fancy metaphor about things unforeseeable.  Blah blah blah - that’s not why I like it.  I like it in its literal sense.  I like it because that little weather proverb rings true right down in the cob of my little corn-fed heart.  That old weather adage was probably written about Missouri.  The weather in the show-me state is stable in the same way that the beaches there are beautiful, which is to say not at all. 

We Missourians have our own weather proverb.  It goes, “If you don’t like the weather in Missouri, wait a couple minutes.”  Now that’s a weather proverb.  Score update for clever weather proverbs: Outkast: 1.  Missouri: 1.  The ball’s in your court, Andre 3000. 

I spent my whole life, or rather 28/29ths of it, in Missouri, so I subscribed to that sensible nugget of weather wisdom wholeheartedly.  It makes sense there. It does not make sense here.  


When I moved to the UAE,where the yearly weather is predictable  - or rather 364/365ths of it - I got cocky about how well I could predict the weather.  I’d say things like, “Oh weird, another hot, sunny day – never could have predicted that!” And my comment would be so wet with sarcasm that it could hydrate an adult camel for two years.  

“You know,” I’d offer up, pointing my fingers to my temples and squinting my eyes, “my fortune telling skills tell me that tomorrow is going to be sunny and hot.”  And sure enough...

Here in my new desert home, the weather didn't change by the minute like it did in my home state.  In the UAE I could predict the weather (or so I thought).  So against my better judgment I questioned Oukast’s lyrics.  Psshhh – what do you know, Outkast?  You obviously never lived in the desert.  You-can-plan-a-pretty-picnic-but-you-cain’t-predict-the-weather my ass.

Bad idea.  Never again will I question the wisdom of Andre 3000's rap lyrics.  I paid dearly for my insubordination.  The Weather God is apparently an Outkast fan too, because He struck vengence on me for my skepticism.

Last weekend, unpredictable weather pummeled me and 14 of my friends.  It catastrophicated our camping trip so badly that I’m currently questioning whether or not I’ll ever be able to snap another tent pole together in my life.  We spent a night getting battered by weather elements that had no business being out in the desert.  And don’t tell my fellow campers this, but I think our suffering was because of me, because I offended the weather God’s taste in early 2000’s rap by questioning a sacred verse from the book of Andre 3000.

In Missouri, the weather is not only erratic season-to-season; it changes by the hour.  You have a better chance at predicting the winning number in a game of Besty Bingo in 100 acres of green pasture than to predict tomorrow’s weather.  (If you don’t know what Betsy Bingo is, get a clue.  In Missouri, we cultivated the most sophisticated gambling game in the world where high-rollers place money on precisely which square foot of land they think a cow will shit on).  

It sounds like hyperbole, I know, but I swear on a winning cow-patty it’s true. You honestly cannot predict the weather there at all.  Back in Missouri, I often wore a heavy pea coat, mittens, and a beanie to work in the mornings and then blasted the air conditioner on my way home in the afternoon.  Missouri meteorologists are just palm readers with TV shows.  I remember going to bed with my little red swimming trunks on after watching our local weatherman Mike Bracciano’s glimmering forecast only to find myself, the very next day, standing in knee-deep snow with my moonboots on; I think my first cussword was “Damn” followed by, “you, Mike Bracciano.”

Event planning is tricky in Missouri because the weather is a total crapshoot, the likes of which even Betsy the cow’s backside couldn’t compete with after a bushel of corn laced with laxatives.  Most events are planned with a tentative backup date.  Well-planned events are planned with a backup date for the backup date. The words Event Postponed Due To Weather are quoted as frequently as scripture in the show-me-state.  The poor folks there can plan a pretty picnic, but they’ve got to plan it three times before the weather cooperates. 

But it’s not like that here in the desert.  I was chatting up a fellow expat Missourian, and the topic turned to UAE weather.  I suggested that the plan-a-pretty-picnic proverb simply doesn’t hold water on the Arabian Peninsula.  Come to think of it, the statement doesn’t hold water isn’t exactly the kind of idiom that has much meaning in the desert either.  Or at least you wouldn’t think so…but that’s because YOU think there's no water in the desert because YOU have never been humiliated by a desert rainstorm.  I have.

“In the UAE,” I gushed confidently, “You can plan a pretty picnic AND predict the weather.  Where you at on that one, Outkast?”  And if memory serves me correctly - which it does – my fellow ex-Missourian greeted my revelation with a nod of understanding and affirmation.  

“Ha.  Outkast,” he said.  We Missourians are sensible folk who do things like nod affirmatively and bet on pooping cows, but we’re also well versed in the lyrical content of 2001 grammy-winning rap albums. 

Now, I have no degree in meteorology; I don’t even know what a barometer does, and I’m no Nostradamus either.  But before the desert rainstorm debacle last weekend ruined my sense of confidence, I felt like I was, so I forecasted the weather in the UAE for one year.  

January through April – Clear skies and hot.  0% chance of precipitation.

May through June – Clear skies and pack-extra-underwear Hot. 0% chance of precipitation.

August – “You know, Hell looks like a nice place for a vacation.”  0% chance of precipitation.

September through December – Clear skies and well, anything is better than August? 0% chance of precipitation.

And there you have it.  In the desert, as far as I was concerned, Andre 3000’s quote didn’t hold any water make any sense.  But I was wrong, and Outkast’s lyrics were right.  I admit it.  Unfortunately, I only admit it now because that stream of knowledge along with 12 kilos of sand got shot into my head by the most unlikely weather I’ve ever not laid eyes on because my eyes were too full of sand.

I would like to cordially invite you, said the invitation I got from my friend Lauren, To the event of the century, aka my 30^th birthday.  Desert camping and BBQ.  Guitars, drums, nudity, and pets welcomed.  Mark off Friday, April the 13^th in your calendars.  Things to get started around dusk.  Map, directions, and BBQ details to follow…

Anything up there catch your eye?  Besides nudity. Anything that foretells of misfortune and bad omens?   Maybe a specific date that we associate with terror and rotten luck?  Perhaps a number we consider unlucky preceded by the word Friday?  Guess who didn’t notice. 

Side note: If you’re trying to tell me something important, don’t put it in the sentence after a sentence containing the words “guitar” and “nudity.” I reckon I’d probably overlook just about anything so long as it falls directly after such a focus-deflecting sentence.  Guitars, drums, nudity, and pets welcomed.  Also, if you come someone there will gut you with a dull sword.  Wowzers, Guitars and nudity?!  I’ll be there!

I marked the date on my calendar, scrubbed out my cooler, worked up a set list of campfire songs, and got good and exciterated about a great night of desert camping.  The last desert camping trip I took was one of the finest nights of my life.  Fresh air.  Warm sand.  Cool breeze.  Big sky.  Great food.   I had similar expectations for this one.  And in a place where the weather is actually predictable, what could possibly go wrong?

When Lauren’s birthday celebration/camping trip began, it had all the makings of another legendary night, and I guess it was a legendary night.  After all, technically you could call Sadaam Hussein legendary. The happy campers all showed up on time with their coolers, tent bags, and smiles.  I was the only one who showed up naked; other than that everything started out perfectfully.  Well, almost perfectfully.

I was also the only camper who showed up in an SUV.  For you dirt huggers out there who are unfamiliar with desert terrain please note that driving in the deep sand without big tires and four-wheel drives falls somewhere between inadvisable and impossible.  In light of this fact, all the partygoers parked their cars on the road, and I caravanned us in multiple trips out to the dunes. I loaded and unloaded four shipments of people and gear via SUV.  All in all – about 15 people were on hand as we started the fire, fired up the grill, and grilled up the meat.  That makes 14 witnesses who will confirm that this freefall, from enjoyfullness to demoralizification, actually happened. 

I don’t have a particularly impressive history of training when it comes to driving on sand dunes.  My experience driving into sand is entirely limited to the handful of times I’ve been golfing and teed off straight into the bunker.  As for conducting vehicles on dunes, this was my first time, and it’s not as easy as it sounds. There is a great deal of skill involved.  Even the best “Dune Bashers” get stuck when they drive their 4X4s through the desert, and they’ve been driving in it since they were knee high to a camel puppy.  But guess which newbie dune basher you’re reading right now didn’t get stuck?  The Toyota and I cut through that sand like we’d been doing it together our whole lives. Party on!

The fire crackled, the skewers sizzled, the laughter bounced around, and before long the suds started flowing.  Happily hidden between rolling dunes, we made merry like only Bedouin wannabes can.  The party was turning out to be, as it was billed, the event of the century. But the Outkast-loving weather God had not forgotten my transgression, and the fun was only short-terming.

After dinner and sunset, I broke out the guitar and we all sang happy birthday and every other sing-along tune in my repertoire.  It’d be just spiffing if I could tell you, for the sake of synchronicity, that one of the songs on my list was Outkast’s Ms. Jackson, and that together we songfilled the entire desert with the line, “You can plan a pretty picnic but you cain’t predict the weather.”  I don’t know how to play that song though, because even though it's so good that even the Weather God loves it, the only lines anyone would remember well enough to sing along with are the 3 I’ve mentioned. That disqualifies a song, regardless of Who loves it, as a sing-along.  So that didn’t happen.

What did happen was that one of the happy campers, we’ll call him Andre 3000 because I want to protect his identity and I’m desperate for some synchronicity here, got a bit upside down on the beer.  And Andre 3000 doesn’t drink much, which almost excuses the mistake he made; only the mistake he made left this otherwise songfull group of partiers lying in broken tents with soggy sand-soaked bodies wishing they were dead.  His mistake, innocent as it was, left us helpless while the angry weather gods hurricaned through the desert and clobbered us with their arsenals, destroying what could have been perfectification.

Andre 3000 is usually a moderate drinker – a sip here or there just to prove he’s not stuck up - again I’m looking for a way to excuse his mistake.  One of the symptoms of only infrequently inebriating yourself - and thus not having a catalog of experiences to tell you otherwise - is that when you do get sloshed you think you can do things you can’t; things like drive my white Toyota SUV back to your car to get something in the middle of the night when you’re not an experienced desert driver and now it’s dark and you’re drunk. 

Those of us who have plenty of experiences dealing with our less-than-sober selves know our libation-induced limits.   I’m frigging awesome at double backflips off the diving board when I’m sober and man I feel like trying a triple, but maybe I should stick to cannonballs considering I just shotgunned my 5th can of suds out of a swimming noodle.

People who are infrequent drinkers tend to make big mistakes when they do get sauced because they’re not well acquainted with the drunken versions of themselves. They make mistakes like going ahead and trying the triple back flip and painting the surface of the pool red.  Or sometimes they make mistakes like driving way too slowly on the sand thus causing the tires to sink and then refusing to listen when I suggest we leave well enough alone and deal with the problem in the morning. They make mistakes like saying no we can get out of this and then flooring the gas and peeling out until the entire undercarriage of my SUV is sitting on the sand. 

But mistakes are forgivable at times like these.  It’s a party after all. So Andre 3000 made a classic party foul - getting a 4X4 stuck in the sand.  Who hasn’t gotten soggy at a college frat party and done that?  I decided not to let one minor setback set me back, even minorly, and it was decided unanimously by me that we’d call someone to come pull us out in the morning when there wasn’t so much good food to eat and good songs to sing and great times to be experienced.  And back we went to merrymaking and enjoyifying on a perfect night out under the stars.

But then something happened, and when I say something I mean everything that could possibly go wrong.  The wind started to howl over the dunes and our tents all began to lean slightly away from us like a sand dune was sucking them in.  We all exchanged a few worried glances.  We’re still desert rookies, but we’ve been here long enough to know that desert windstorms can get violent quicker than a pit bull when you flick his balls. 

Wind is never a good thing unless you’re flying a kite, and if you think flying a kite is fun you probably wouldn’t know a good thing if it came up and bit you in the jugular.  Wind is an especially not-good thing in the desert.  (Interesting fact #1:  Did you know that those cloth thingies Arabs swirl atop their heads are not just for decoration?  You’ve never seen an Arab wearing one swirled atop his nugget when it’s windy because when the wind comes, they wrap them across their faces to protect their eyes, nose, and mouth from sand.)  (Interesting fact #2: None of us so-call Bedouin wannabes had one of those cloth things packed.)

Grey clouds closed up the view of the stars like a curtain after a Broadway show, and then suddenly a ferocious gust of wind picked up speed and, along with it, picked up loose sand and our tents.  We were blinded by high-velocity sand grains just in time to not see our tents get picked up like kites and thrown out across the blackened sand. 

Without those cloth thingies to aid our vision, we began blindly running about, picking up anything that might blow away.  And that included just about everything.  The wind was such that the list of things that couldn’t blow away was very short:  


List of things heavy enough to not blow away in desert windstorm:
1.  The sunken SUV.


Then during a short break in the wind, all of us bolted to our tents to try and reassemble them and weigh them down with whatever we could find.  The only thing I could think of to weigh down my tent was my own body.  I plopped down cross-legged on my sleeping bag just in time for the tent to collapse on top of me.  I watched as the thin plastic cover, meant to keep rain out of a tent, lifted off and kited itself, stringlessly, out into the desert sky. 

Before long, sand began piling up around me in little miniature dunes.  Or at least I think it did.  I couldn’t see anything because miniature sand dunes were forming on my irises.  And in my armpits.  And in my shorts.  And in both my ears.  Relentless waves of sand rushed into my tent, one after another, until even my mouth was brimming with it.  And I would have gladly abandoned all of my belongings and drove us all out of there except for the fact that the truck was as mobile as the phone on my grandpa’s desk, which is to say not at all. 

Well why didn’t you at least go get in the truck, turn on the air con, and wait it out there, you ask?  Oh, did I not mention that I forgot to fill up with gas on my way out to camp, and that in our futile attempts to unstick the truck we ran her dry?  Did I also not mention that the temperature inside a dead, unventilated vehicle in the desert is well over 100 degrees F even during a windstorm?  

For hours I skulked in my tent getting bludgeoned by sand and thinking things couldn’t get any worse.  And then they got worse. 

I’m not exactly sure what the statistical likelihood is for rain in the desert, but my guess is that you could put ol’ Betsy on a pair of rollerskates in a Wal-Mart parking lot, give her a shove, and still have a better chance at guessing which space she’d drop her dook in.

At first, I refused to believe it.  Was Andre 3000 right?  (The rapper, not the drunken 4X4 sumberger who I pennamed Andre 3000 for the sake of synchronicity).  Is it impossible to predict the weather on the day of your pretty picnic even when you’re in the desert?  This is the question I sat and pondered as my lifeless tent clung to my body like a wet blanket, and rain and sand coagulated high in the black sky and pelleted me with what can only be describe as sandhail – marble sized capsules of wet sand that hardened like cement as they careened from the sky.

For a full 3 hours it rained.  The wind raged and carried away our bags.  Sand piles covered our belongings.  Our grills toppled over.  The sand dunes shifted.  The fire got snuffed.  And there I sat, exposed and humiliatinized by the angry, Outkast-Fan, Weather God.

If you’ve ever exfoliated your face with that gritty soap stuff and you scrubbed it into your pores trying to get all that dirt out - you know what my whole body felt like.  Only it was worse.  The wet sand didn’t exfoliate my pores, it clogged them, along with every other orifice on my body.  And there was nowhere to go and nothing to do except sit cross-legged in a dilapidated tent and accept the fundamental Buddhist concept that Life Is Suffering. 

Well played, Weather God.  Well played.

When the sun finally peeked up over the sand dunes and the rain and the wind stopped,  I walked around our campsite listening to my fellow campers ask things like, “Has anyone seen my iPod,” and “Where is Heather’s tent?  Wait...where is HEATHER?”  I dug my box of wet wipes out and used the entire box just getting the sand off of my fingers so that I could use my fingernails to excavate the sand from my ears. 

And then I did what all of us do when we’ve been in the wrong. I apologized. Sorry, I said silently, to the entire kast of Outkast (especially Andre 3000).  I was wrong, I admit it.  You can plan a pretty picnic but you cain't predict the weather.  Then I apologized to the weather God, the one who’d gone Poseidon on my Odysseusness, and punished me for my insubordination.  Sorry, I whispered.  I didn’t know You loved Outkast so much. I will never question Andre 3000 again.

And it was an honest promise.  You can plan a pretty picnic but you CAIN’T predict the weather.  And this time, I’ll buy that Forever.  Forever ever?  Forever ever ever.