You’ve heard this say­ing: “If you don’t like the weath­er in (wher­ev­er you are), just wait five min­utes and it’ll change!”

This, my friends, is Fake News. I’ve lived in, or spent enough time in, enough states to get an idea what the weath­er is like: Ore­gon, Wash­ing­ton (State and DC), Col­orado, Texas, Ari­zona, Flori­da (and Aku­mal, Mex­i­co and Guangzho, Chang­sha, and Hong Kong).

But I grew up in Kansas.¹ Kansas is the only place where the “wait five min­utes and the weath­er will change” joke applies. In fact, Kansas is the only place I’ve ever lived that has weath­er at all, and I can prove it. To do so I need to talk about cof­fee:

Back some mum­bledy-sev­en years ago, I worked after­noons at the state hos­pi­tal and got off at 11. Depend­ing on how much mon­ey we had, my friend Rob and I would either dri­ve around and drink beer till the wee hours of the morn­ing, or go down­town to Pore Richard’s, pay for one bot­tom­less  cup of cof­fee each, and drink cof­fee till the wee hours of the morn­ing.

Pore Richard’s was a restau­rant and café where you could spend a lot of mon­ey on steak or lob­ster or oth­er pricey munchies, or you could spend $1.25 on a cup of cof­fee and get refills until you start­ed to vibrate.

Being broke, and giv­en that Nin­ten­do and iPhones and Android and X‑Box and restau­rants with dozens of TVs show­ing every chan­nel there is at ear-shat­ter­ing vol­ume were all years in the future, we had to find some­thing else to do. So we’d talk and argue and talk with the servers and argue about things with them, all of which are alas becom­ing lost arts.

But most often we would whip out Road Notes and get busy.

Road Notes was a big 200-page col­lege-ruled spi­ral note­book (sev­er­al, in fact; I still have about 10 of them and I’m pret­ty sure there were more).

And upon the pages of Road Notes we would inflict song lyrics; goofy draw­ings; vignettes; short sto­ries writ­ten back and forth between us, two para­graphs apiece; all man­ner of things.

One night I was noodling around in Road Notes and the Wham song—oops; I mean the WHAM! song—“Careless Whis­per” came on our table juke­box, which meant some­one at one of the oth­er tables had dropped a dime in their table juke­box.

Then it came on again. And again. And again. Now, I like this song and I liked it back then. It wasn’t as bad as some­one play­ing “What’s New Pussy­cat?” 21 times in a row, but it was wear­ing thin. I sac­ri­ficed a dime from pet­ty cash (aka the serv­er-tip­ping cash) to play some­thing else, but some­one in the restau­rant had just bro­ken up with some­one else and was drown­ing his or her sor­rows in a tsuna­mi of dimes to hog the juke­box.

Rob grabbed Road Notes from me and start­ed draw­ing. A minute lat­er he hand­ed back a pair of draw­ings. One was a cred­i­ble forgery of the old “Loose Lips Sink Ships” poster labeled “Care­less Whis­per,” except the sol­dier gab­bing at his girl­friend had a bull­horn aimed right at Hitler and was blow­ing his hair and mus­tache off.

Next to that was a draw­ing of a bald woman, labeled “Hair­less Sis­ter.”

I said, “Hair­less Sis­ter”? Rob said, “Wait; don’t tell me you haven’t heard this. The Hair­less Sis­ter song? On Dr. Demen­to?”

I hadn’t, but I did lat­er: Hair­less Sis­ter was a spoof of Care­less Whis­per, in which a high school guy’s sis­ter shaves her head, and her broth­er is singing about how he’ll nev­er go to school again, because an embar­rassed mind can do no learn­ing.

So I grabbed Road Notes back and drew an old woman yelling “Get me some pears!”, labeled “Pear­less Spin­ster,” which set off a pret­ty damn good pun war, which end­ed like this:

After sev­er­al more rounds, Rob drew a pic­ture of Dee Snider with a corkscrew stick­ing out of a big lump on his arm. It was titled, “Twist­ed Blis­ter.”

I looked at him and said “Twist­ed Blis­ter”? You HATE Twist­ed Sis­ter! What song is this, We’re Not Gonna Lance It? He snick­ered and said, “Your move!”

I made a few false starts and then inspi­ra­tion struck: I drew a pic­ture of a house with a tor­na­do head­ing its way. There was anoth­er tor­na­do on the oth­er side of the house.

The first tor­na­do was say­ing, “Help me wreck this house!” The oth­er tor­na­do said, “Sure!”

I titled it Assist­ed Twister.

I pushed Road Notes back at Rob. He looked at Assist­ed Twister and start­ed to laugh. So did I.

Before long we were both howl­ing and falling out of the booth and try­ing very sin­cere­ly not to wet our pants and/or have asth­ma attacks.

 

So I—yes, I know it’s a hor­ri­ble pun. But that was wh—What? Look, you had to be there. Any­way, we—okay, shut up and sit down. You don’t have to like a bad pun. You just have to respect its courage to be seen in pub­lic.

So let me abrupt­ly change the sub­ject:

I men­tioned ear­li­er that I lived in Ore­gon for a while. I went to col­lege in Ore­gon, in fact. One day I was walk­ing to a class with some­one, and he said, “You’re from Kansas? Weren’t you alla time scared of tor­na­does?”

I said, “You’re from Port­land in spit­ting dis­tance of five vol­ca­noes; ain’t you alla time scared of the floor being lava?”

If you live in Port­land, you can’t wait five min­utes for the weath­er to change: Port­land doesn’t HAVE weath­er. All the weath­er folks on the news have to say is, “Fore­cast: Damp. Cur­rent con­di­tions: About to Rain, Rain­ing, or Just Stopped Rain­ing.”

Arizona’s just the oppo­site: The weath­er in Prescott Val­ley is always mild and sun­ny (unless you’re in Phoenix, where the weath­er is always boil-your-eyballs hot and sun­ny), except that in Prescott Val­ley it rains a few weeks late in the sum­mer, which they call “Mon­soon sea­son,” like they’re in Tahi­ti.

But Kansas—Kansas, my friends, has WEATHER. Back in about ’91, I remem­ber try­ing to dri­ve to work one morn­ing, but it was so cold the trans­mis­sion flu­id was like molasses and the car couldn’t move an inch.

Lat­er that same win­ter, on New Year’s eve, I left work at 11pm and it was a balmy 75°. When the sun came up on New Year’s day it was 20 below zero, and a lot of peo­ple couldn’t get to work because the tem­per­a­ture extremes made a grain ele­va­tor explode, cov­er­ing I‑70 with a 30-foot-high wheat­drift.

Lat­er that spring I was attempt­ing to dash from my car to my house dur­ing a nasty thun­der­storm, and I took a rac­quet­ball-sized hail­stone to the nog­gin that almost knocked me uncon­scious.

I’ve seen it cold enough in Kansas you could spit and it would freeze before it hit the ground. I’ve seen it hot enough that recent­ly resur­faced roads soft­ened up, leav­ing cars mired in asphalt.

Kansas folks are tough enough to deal with apoc­a­lyp­tic weath­er, but Kansas just doesn’t get any respect.

In Dia­monds Are For­ev­er, the evil vil­lain Blofeld asks Bond, James Bond, how he should set about extort­ing the world with his giant space laser.

“I sup­pose I could destroy Kansas,” Blofeld says, “but it would take years for any­one to notice!”

Hyuk hyuk hyuk. But con­sid­er this: If Kansas was destroyed, all that real weather—frozen spit, boil­ing asphalt, Mama-said-knock-you-out hail­stones and tor­na­does, oh my—would have to hap­pen in oth­er states, where peo­ple talk about how the weath­er changes every five min­utes but don’t have a clue what’s in store for them.

Think about that the next time you’re mock­ing Kansas with your hilar­i­ous Wiz­ard of Oz jokes.

1. Well, I was born there and lived there until I was old enough to buy beer.