less than 40 minutes ago pres. clinton made a brief statement on nat'l tv regarding his relationship with monica lewinsky. my parents, in the hours approaching the speech, touted it as history in the making. well, for history in the making it sure wasn't interesting. i've never been able to make myself care about this allegedly momentous story. it's not like he's the first president to have an affair. hell, if i were president i'd sleep with everybody. it's a high-stress job, & only frequent sexing would be able to quiet the tension. big deal.

as you can guess, this week's sermon is not about anything like that. nobody ever accused sermons of being topical. issue-based, sure, but hardly plucked from the morning's headlines.

perhaps some people would like them better if they were. i recently received some rash criticism from my own sister regarding the sermon for week 9. somehow she skimmed all my slicko synonyms for "frame" & decided that the overall piece was dull. this might be a sign that the subliminal mind-control messages i've been embedding in my text haven't been strong enough lately. either that or, just maybe, all the genetic code we share makes her invulnerable to my charismatic manipulation. nah...

she did, however, offer me a suggestion. "surely the waether [sic] is just as intriguing," she wrote. & she was right. the weather is quite intriguing. it's also quite annoying.

the 2 historic bases of operations of stAllio!'s wAy have been cape girardeau (amusingly called "america's heartland" by local tv) & indianapolis, both smack in the drabness of the midwest. right now it happens to be summer, which means that going outside is a lot like walking into an unventilated basement. the air is musty & thick, so damp & humid that at times it's hard to tell whether you're sweating or the air around you is.

the only noticeable difference between outside in the midwestern summer & being in a dank dungeon is the amount of light available. outside (during the day at least, & i'm cursed to be awake during the whole thing thanks to my job) the sun makes everything just a little (well, okay, a lot) too bright to see. personally i'd much prefer the dungeon. there's a far better ambiance.

i've always been averse to direct sunlight (& i'm almost as averse to the ridiculously routine "vampire" references that my attitude elicits from others). overcast days are nice, but recently it hasn't been overcast nearly enough, if ever. personally i just don't see any benefits of direct sunlight. for one thing, it impairs vision even more than darkness. eyes can adjust to the dark, but looking directly at the sun causes permanent damage.

& while we're talking about permanent damage, we might as well discuss the other side effect of exposure to sunlight: skin cancer. yes, it's been declared again & again that the sun causes skin cancer, along with a host of other unpleasant skin problems such as wrinkles. they tell us this repeatedly in all the media every summer. but do people listen? no, they want to get tan so they can look "sexy".

yep, tans are sexy, they say. i know whenever i see a pale woman i think, "she's cute, but she'd look so much better with melanoma. yeah, maybe some blisters, some skin peeling here & there, a bunch of crows feet... how erotic." tans are considered such a hot item that people will actually lie in fluroescent booths, exposing themselves to concentrated bursts of cancer to make themselves darker faster.

but even on an overcast day it's still hot & muggy & generally unpleasant outside. according to legend, the only natural relief from a hot summer day is a cool breeze. however in my experience it doesn't work that way. the wind typically doesn't blow much in the summer, & when it does it only blows hot muggy air.

if you can't tell & don't already know, i can't stand wind. it's my natural enemy. after all, i smoke, have longish hair, & wear baggy clothes. the wind messes up everything about me. &, as i said, it never blows when it might be useful. cool breezes are almost nonexistant. for the most part the wind only blows when it's already cold outside, changing the temperature from a respectable 28 (for example) to -5454356.

i remember my first truly traumatic encounter with the wind. i was in junior high, & had a paper route. i was still young & emotionally vulnerable, & was attempting to gather together all my newspapers so i could deliver them. that's when the wind kicked in. about an hour & a half later, after much help from others, i finally got them all, most crinkled or crumpled-up in a condition that my subscribers certainly wouldn't care for. but what could i do? i was a victim of nature, as surely as if i'd been hit by a tornado or hurricane (which are also nothing more than glorified winds).

at this point you might expect me to move on to rain, snow, sleet, hail, and so on. but i have to say that precipitation doesn't bother me much. as long as i have an umbrella or equivalent, i don't find such things to be a problem. maybe they can get irritating withoug proper protection, but what's the worst that can happen? my clothes'll get wet. it's a lot better than skin cancer.