I rolled my jeep with the airborne sticker into the Wholefoods parking lot, blaring an insidious Steely Dan tune. I got a Starbucks in one hand and a cig in the other. Yeah, I am that guy. They say the next generation being born right now has no logical excuse to ever start smoking. With all the negative publicity tobacco gets, I would say they are right with the exception of the James Dean factor. Some people are just born to be the bad guys. Thank those clueless rebels for us. Without them even more of my friends would die. As it is they have already morphed to fit the times, but to what price? Joe C. and Marley are chock full of chemicals. Winston preaches, “No bull!” We know better. We see him in the back room loading up the papers with gunpowder just like the rest of them. Both Benson and Hedges are lying in hospital beds coughing up a lung. Spirit used to be on the straight and narrow until he bowed down to the kingdom of Phil Morris. Now, I just don’t know. I haven’t seen him in a while.

By their logic we should get rid of the coffee drinkers in three generations and the fossil fuel burners in five . . . or vice versa. Coffee guzzling seems to be on a fad while gas guzzling is definitely not. That is more of a pocketbook issue than a really want to save the planet one. A gallon of gas is still cheaper than a cup of Starbucks. Me? I am drinking iced green tea, sweetened. If I do drink coffee, which I do, it is a rich, dark, black, bitter morning drink, and by morning I mean any time after midnight. Those poor guys are multiplying like crazy. When the bottom falls out of the java industry there are going to be a lot of them out of work and looking for something new. The Chocolates have a pretty sealed up industry. They might as well be the mafia. Some of them are connected. Reese, the twin M’s, Alma Joy. Cross the Hershey family and you’ll be sleeping with the Swedish fishes in a deep Oompa Loompa pond. On the other end, you have the elitists. Lady Godiva may be sweet, but she sure is a stuck up bitch. Buck and Dunkin won’t have any problems keeping on keeping on like the Queen. It is the little man I worry about. Even poor Zotz was exiled to Italy when twenty years ago, he was the all American rage.

The immortals really tick me off. They think they cannot lose. They think they have been around so long that people need them. They think people can hardly afford not to have them around in their lives. I have seen them come and go. The fleeting are much more permanent. Ole Walt and Jim had a good thing going while they were alive. They are some of the few humans we trusted. When they passed on, things changed. Tink became a real bitch. What do you expect from a child star, though? Ms. P was always a bitch, but she had standards. They would not do just anything to keep their magic.

I might be getting ahead of myself. I am talking about faeries. Most people think of sunshine and glitter when I mention faeries. Sure, they have a high population of flowers and butterflies. There are just as many metals and rock, too. For anything you can think of there is a governing faerie body involved. A blade of grass, a chip of concrete, a single cell of blood, a morsel of thought, an orgasm. All faeries. Every drop of rain that mates with a speck of dirt instantly swells a belly full of mud and usually gives birth to a leafy dryad. They live in sentiments and emotions. I cannot tell you how many love faeries there are, but there are just as many for hate, always changing, always reinventing themselves, reproducing some bastard offspring, merging, splitting, dying, and being reborn. Not the immortals, though. Some of your power goes away when you replicate. The immortals hate that. They like to keep it all for themselves. They forget that the baby grows as it becomes an adult.

I flick my butt into a grassy pot at the front doors of the supermarket. A lady looks at me cross. Nothing to worry about, hippie. It was filterless. I hate those fiberglass little shits. Most of us are mischievous. I can accept that. It is our nature. Mine most of all. These guys jump down your throat ripping things up quietly. I like to make noise, let them know I was here. The infra red and electrode faeries realize I am walking as a man and open for me. It takes them a minute sometimes and I have not traveled in this area for a while. I smile and thank them in a language humans usually ignore.

Yes, even in electricity there are faeries. How do you think computers work? or lights? Think about the shuffle function in your iPod. Songs are chosen randomly. Somehow it evaluates the mood of your circumstance and picks the right choices from your massive collection to fit seamlessly together in a row. Offering the opportunity of random chance is the perfect way to summon the fae. Now, many of you are racking your head meat to find a spot of memory where the transition did not fit. A few things might have happened. You might have had a gremlin in your system. Gremlins are faeries also by the way. So are elves and trolls and dwarves. I know they do not have wings. That is another common misconception I will get to in a minute. Another possibility is that they were trying to tell you something and you were too stubborn to listen. And last, but certainly not least, I have already mentioned that we tend to be mischievous.

So, the whole wing thing and being small and clapping your hands or ringing a bell. These are misconceptions like vampyres and sunlight or holy artifacts. Yes, vampyres exist, too. A good way to tell if someone is a vampyre, aside from their lack of reflection in a mirror, is they refuse to wash their hands unless the bathroom has a manual knob to turn on the water. They also almost always look at the paper dispenser to make sure it has a handcrank. The infrareds and the mirror faeries refuse to acknowledge them. It is true they usually do not like holy artifacts either as long as the wielder has enough faith. That is what they really have a problem with. Christianity and vampyrism are bitter enemies. Anyway, wings. Not all of us have them. Take elves for instance. You remember my spiel about the every blade of grass, well, every patch and meadow has an elf to guard it. Most elves do not truck with wings. Some do. An occasional leaf climbers or the child of a grasshopper rider does. Even the famous Tink is really an elf faerie. Flower faeries and glitter pixies usually always have wings. In the past they were a bit more flamboyant, especially to writers and artists like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or more recently Amy Brown. They drew them like they saw them out of the corner of their eyes. Your typical vampyre has more vices than just sucking blood. There are psychic vampyres, emotional vampyres, affection whores, succubi, information mongers, and blood fiends. Lets not even get into the whole zombie debate. My point is not to believe everything you have read.

Dwarves are the most pigeonholed. We picture them as ugly little short men. Well, they are, but this is beside the point. There are dwarf women, too. Dwarves tend to stick to mining rocks. In some veins of ore they are catalysts to other species. Dwarves not only mine the diamond, but they put the sparkle in it too. Thousands of tiny pixies, dwarf children, hover around it throwing sunlight at each other. Put it on a ring or a post, give it to some chick, and the love faeries join the crowd. I told you there were many of them. Not all of them are good. Sometimes it is the ring they are throwing instead of the sunlight. Yes, we are a mischievous lot.

I finger the tomatoes and mangoes. They have no pesticides. Those bastards are almost as bad as the fiberglass shits. Even washing them with tap water faeries hardly gets all them buggers off. This is not what I am here for, though. I scan for the flowers. It is so hard for me to buy flowers from a store. The best analogy for a human is buying a puppy from the mall. They are always so sad and ignorant about any other life. I want to take the lot. Instead, I pick out all of the bloomers who have just begun to noticeably wilt. I will take them out for a spin on the town while their life force expires. Pet stores do not sell the middle aged dog. I do not want to know what they do to them. Flower shops throw them in the garbage. There is probably not much difference. A whole rack of tulips is on their way out. I scoop them up and softly whisper to them. My whispers are very similar in effect to a large vase of water. After all, I am Daudi Rainmaker. They perk right up. “C’mon girls,” I say, “Lets go have some fun.” They giggle at me calling them girls.

I have wings when I want them. Usually I keep them hidden. Today, I do not need to, but I do anyway. There is a flower faerie festival in town. It is the reason I am here. I make rain. This is more of a sentiment than an actual physical action. They call me the beloved trickster. Making rain is an old saying for causing trouble. Not big trouble. Little things, tricks. Otherwise I would be Daudi Stormthrower. The weather is honoring me with dark cumulus clouds. Normally this area is very dry. Fire sprites play in the mountain shaded valley. The drops begin. All around are little girls dressed in pastels hanging onto their mothers with moping faces. It all goes back to that sunshine and glitter thought process. I look deeper, past the people. There are many brights here. There are some darks. More brights, though. Faeries can see all the other faeries. Do not ever wish for this. You cannot possibly imagine the thorough confusion a human mind would withstand if they could see every faerie they passed on the street. In every breath you inhale a million. Imagine knowing distinctly and intimately the individual smells incorporated with that breath. Now, imagine seeing all of those smells, hearing those smells chittering away with each other, feeling them bounce off your noggin as you make your way down the street, and knowing what they all taste like. No wonder humans choose to ignore them. A faerie mind can comprehend that much and more. We can even recognize when one of us has taken a visible form. If they are human, we call it walking like a man. Some of our number consider this insulting. I don’t. With one like me it is better than no corporeal form at all, which tends to be the nature of sentiments. Emotions have that problem also.

These poor, sad, little children in their costumes. I begin my beloved trickery. First, I hand out the tulips. The ladies know what to do. They make the kids smile. Enough happiness can chase away any storm cloud for a time. They tell the recipients how happy the wetness has made the flowers, but they could use a taste of sun right now. Children can hear faeries. They can see some of them. They have not yet learned how to ignore them like an adult. The power of a baby grows. Babies can see them all. They cannot understand them, but they see them. Ignorance in this instance is a power. It is like blocking out the neighbor playing rap music until late so you can sleep enough for work the next day. It takes power.

All of the girls are gone. They are in the hands of pastels and brights, waving them like wands. Their petals are shedding all over the cobblestone walk. They are having a great time. I can hear them hooting and hollering. They are laughing. Do you wonder if they expected to play this hard while they were sitting in that shop? I stand in the background. The trick is done. The clouds part. I thank them for their honor. The sun comes out. It will last at least for the next couple of hours. Long enough for the attention span of the festival goers. Any more time than this and the costumed faeries are going to have a meltdown from not taking their midday nap. Being a rainmaker is not always about the weather. I light another smoke and head for the nearest Starbucks. Man, I love his green tea, sweetened.