Weather or Not

He entered the cafe and took off his surgical mask, pulled up a chair and placed his bulging black briefcase on the table. I was still trying to figure out why a surgical mask dangled from his neck when he asked me “is this the meeting?” I wasn’t sure how to reply, because it was in fact “a meeting”, but I wasn’t sure if it was “the meeting”. As far as I was concerned, nobody else had an established meeting time at Tealand every night at 7pm. By the time I had a grasp on the question, his briefcase was open and scientific papers had scattered across the table.

“I came here to inform you of some very important information that I believe will have a large impact on the upcoming election” he said as the surgical mask jiggled snuggly against his adam’s apple, “Are you familiar with subsonic atmospheric weather variations?”
At this point, it became fairly clear that this man was a conspiracy theorist. I didn’t pay much attention to what he was saying at first as I was still confused by why he removed the surgical mask upon entering the cafe. Was the air safer inside? I became increasingly conscious of my own susceptibility to airborne biological weapons and held my breath.
While I was afraid to open my mouth, the conspiracy theorist took advantage of my now captivated Democratic audience. He told the would-be volunteers about how the government was using weather-control to suppress the vote in the upcoming election. He asked them if they knew that Donald Rumsfeld had the ability to unleash deadly tornados with pinpoint accuracy upon innocent civilians. He told them that it has to be true because a professor recently got fired for suggesting it.
He grabbed highlighted maps and bar charts showing historical representations of weather patterns and tried to pass them around the table, but everybody just quickly darted their eyes at his hands and looked away quickly. It was as if he squashed a mosquito in his hands and held them out to show everybody the resulting rorschach. They wanted to listen to him, but they did not want to acknowledge his ideas or think his thoughts.
The would-be volunteers looked to me to restore order to the informal meeting at Tealand. Innocent bystander cafe goers (those not affiliated with our meeting), paid close attention to me to see how things unfolded, much like a light-blue helmet in a nascent third world democracy…
I wish I had given a speech right then and there. I wish I had spoken of choice and control, whether or weather. I wish I had channeled voices of poets past and maybe even quoted one of those Federalist papers my middle school government teacher made us memorize.
Instead, I told the conspiracy theorist that he was late to the meeting and we were actually just wrapping up…