Grey Weather, Just Fool Me
August 21st, 2026
The smell of rain hangs in the air this morning, and the sky is grey, waiting, waiting. It will come down soon. I don’t know when. Maybe if I checked the weather channel or any other number of sites and apps that might tell me, but not knowing is fun sometimes.
Some part of me feels guilty for enjoying rainy days. It says to me that everyone does, that this is not a unique thought and that I would do better to find any other type of day to enjoy. Snowy days? Sort of the same issue, although their infrequency (ever-decreasing as the days and months and years tick on) gives them a different allure. Rainy days will be with us forever, even when the rain itself is unpotable acid that serves only to rot and kill. When I am 50 and looking out over a hellscape of concrete retaining walls and dead soil, the rain will still be with me.
In my mind, they mostly remind me of a few choice moments from back when I was a kid. Rainy days were an excuse that freed me from the constraints of having to go outside and have fun and enjoy myself. They were a chance to stay in and mess around on my computer, loaded up with Minecraft and Paradise Paintball and Roblox and ArmorGames and Skype. I was allowed to sit in my room and eat Cheez-Its by the handful and accomplish nothing.
And there was such freedom in that! My netbook, intended for me to write and draw on, became a portal where hours went in and mindless enjoyment came out. These were before the days where all of these games had introduced microtransactions in such force, so I was almost entirely uninterrupted in exploring new games and worlds.
The soundtrack to those days also carries on. My computer had been loaded with my dad’s entire iTunes library, so I had free reign to listen to anything. It always came back to two things, though: The Final Frontier by Iron Maiden, and my dad’s old roadtrip playlist. The latter was loaded with random tunes which still hold space in my mind and will never be freed from these memories. Shoutouts to “The Emo Song,” burned in my mind forever.
There’s also one day that lives there in my brainspace. I had gone to my closest friend’s house, who lived about five minute’s walk away. There, we sequestered ourselves away in his parent’s bedroom, where a TV was set up alongside an original Xbox. He loaded up Halo 2 and we started the campaign in Co-op, getting all the way to the mission where we had to drive tanks across a bridge. The music swelled, we got hyped, and then it was time for me to go. His parents wanted to go shopping. You know how it is.
I trudged home through the rain in my raincoat and boots, mind racing, and cut around the front of the house into our yard. It had a tendency to flood due to it being kinda flat, and when I made it around to the big clearing that made up most of it, the majority was partially submerged. Grass and clover glittered beneath the water’s surface like they were encased behind glass.
There I was, alone, soaked to the bone, high off the energy of the past two hours (and probably hopped up on candy of some kind, that memory is hazy) and totally in my element. I found a stick on the ground, tore off all but one of its extremities, and imagined it to be my weapon. And I commenced the action. The entire Halo 2 campaign (up to the point where we stopped) was played out there, down to individual voicelines shouted out into the downpour. It was glorious, and tiring, and lasted well over two hours. What fun!
I think about that day a lot, and the ones that followed and preceded it, and the ones that come closer and closer to now, and the ones that never really happened. How many times have I played out a journey southward to the cape in a car that my family never owned, listening to music that we didn’t listen to at the age I picture myself as?
Recently, though, some part of these collective memories has been made to sit uneasily in my mind. Such is the wonder of growing up, maybe, and I think that the cognitive effect of having to recognize this consistent wrinkle has been positive, but it’s there all the same, and it haunts my mind when I think fondly upon my time spent pretending to kill people. It’s from a blogpost by the late author/poet/thinker/etc. Ursula K. Leguin, and it goes something like this:
“The occasional alloy is in the now inevitable stories that imitate electronic games, a more alarming instance of adult control. In these, the Catwings go through “a portal” into the middle of an incoherent adventure involving battles and the slaughter of enemies, monsters, etc. by the million. Evidently this is the only story the child knows. It’s scary to see a mind trapped in an endless repetition of violent acts without meaning or resolution, only escalation to keep the stimulus going.”
It concerns me to no small degree that I see myself in this description. Even now in my adult life, even when I sit down to write as someone who has gone so far as to cut video games almost entirely out of their life, I see myself recreating the story of a video game over and over. Lucy and her cohort must kill and kill and kill until there is nobody left to kill and then they win and the story ends. If they don’t kill, then they will die. That is the furthest depth that my story can offer. You kill or you die.
This isn’t true for every story that I write. My personal project is focused on a character that actively refuses the call to violence while trying to survive in a world scarred by war. There have been plenty of short stories that ignore violence entirely, or only use it as a moment of shock (i.e. the Eyeless Jack rewrite) where there are no adventures and there is nothing to kill, only to try and avoid. Still, even with these digressions and breaks in the pattern, I can’t shake the feeling that games have poisoned my mind in some way. When all I played with for ten years of my childhood was a gun, everything moving forward started to look like a bullet.
All of these thoughts made me consider that there was a clear push for this sort of play culturally as well. I grew up in the golden age of Call of Duty and Battlefield, when NERF guns were still trying to emulate real weapons (without coming too close to an actual gun, of course, but the rough shapes are very similar) and stickfights were still one of the most popular varieties of animation on the net. I was, to the outside world, a boy, and that textured what I was expected and allowed to play with. Even my niche interests (at the time, I realize this rings hollow in a world where the franchise has suddenly boomed in the US) of Godzilla toys were violent.
I’m trying my best to pick up the pieces. Rainy days still sometimes run bloody, but other times they smell of wet leaves and mud and the soft precipitation tells me to calm down. It’s a work in progress.