Rainy days and Fridays always get me down

I got up at 6:30 this morning and it was as dark as Mordor outside and bucketing rain, and I thought to myself (because who else would you think to?), “It should be against the law to have to go to work on a Friday like this.”

Your hear that, President Obama? Screw the health-care reform. You want my vote in 2012, you’ll make this happen.

I got in my car and began the torturous drive to work. As anybody who has driven to work in Atlanta knows, 99 percent of the other drivers act as if they have a closed head injury. This is magnified exponentially when there’s a drop of rain on the road, and today it was like God had out the hosepipe.

I often drive into a work via a route that includes Moreland Avenue, past quaint cute little neighborhoods with names like “Grant Park” and “Kirkwood” and my favorite, “The Ghetto.” There’s not much drainage in this area, perhaps because there are dead bodies clogging the drains, so when it rains hard Moreland Avenue becomes an aqueduct. I thought at any moment I would be sucked into a swirling eddy like Marshall, Will and Holly in “Land of the Lost.” Waves were breaking over the hood of the Impala. Scary stuff.

This marked two days in a row of a testy commute. The day before, I was driving home down a road cleverly named “Boulevard.” (I guess “Street” was taken.) This is a little bit of a shortcut, but it runs right past the federal penitentiary and some housing projects, so you have to know how to navigate this stretch safely. In other words, keep the doors locked, don’t get too close to the car in front of you in case somebody tries to carjack you and you need to make a quick getaway, and avoid making eye contact with the hookers in the parking lot of the convenience store. Do all of that and you’re perfectly safe.

But Thursday, I found the way blocked. I saw police cars and a school bus and flashing lights, so I had to take a detour. I think the street I turned on was called “Crackhouse Lane,” but I was driving too fast to read the signs. I got home and watched the local news and learned that a naked man had climbed on the school bus and some kids had jumped off and finally the bus had run into an empty field. The naked man was subdued, and nobody was hurt or impregnated.

I am hopeful that these misadventures will soon stop. I joined in with about 30 co-workers and we pooled together to buy a bunch of lottery tickets for tonight’s $325 million drawing. The odds of winning this are about 1 in 175 million. We have 150 chances to win, which increases our odds to about 1 in 174.99999 million.

Let me tell you something, if we win, this department will be a ghost town Monday morning, especially in the area of my cube. I’m never coming back. They can keep all my stuff, though I would like the Elvis magnet, for sentimental reasons. Everything else I can replace, and I will never get out of bed on a rainy Friday ever again.