I run! I’m not particularly good at it, but it’s a good way to keep my maniacal frame svelte and fit, and this latest routine has been the most steadily that I’ve been able to keep at it and build miles since I re-started to run for fitness as an adult. Unfortunately, I do have a tendency to overwork, and I recently managed to resurrect some old foot strain that I’ve lately been managing by going out a little less frequently.

All of that background is to say that logging lots of miles is a good way to listen back through some of my favorite idol material, and I was really motivated to do that after work yesterday. I can get into the emotions of the songs for pace and, because my brain has nothing else to worry about, pick through instrumentation and the like. Last night, I opted for NECRONOMIDOL’s recently released (excellent) mini-album from chaos born.

This is the first track, “psychopomp”:

This is what “psychopomp” means

I started playback just as I started up the road. The Music Box of Hell intro was sort of just there from an energy perspective, but then the black metal choir kicked in and I felt like I was in good shape.

Then I saw the clouds. Big, black, low, moving at a breakneck pace in from the northwest. That portion of my run is a fairly steep ascent, and the sudden headwind that hit me felt like the breath of some demon dog. The temperature dropped almost 10 degrees. The air smelled like angry water.

I kept pushing; I hadn’t been able to run since Saturday, and I didn’t want to miss my weekly target by too much. I kept pushing … right into the heart of the onrushing storm.

The first drops hit just as did the first chorus (2:40). They weren’t much, kind of fat but still sparse, and I told myself that the reverse back down the other side of the hill would take me away from the storm — I had a chance to out-run it.

Which was stupid. The storm was moving way faster than I was, and another strong gust right at 3:40 turned optimism to ruin. The rain fell in sheets, visible lighting in the swirling blackness above, cracks of thunder close and audible through the music.

I plunged on, soaked to the skin and actually chilled by wind and rain, everything around me darker by the second. Trees shook, lightning flashed, small rivers formed and swept along next to me. The song reached its absolute crescendo just as a gust ripped a limb from one of the old oaks that dominate the neighborhood and dropped it not 20 feet from my path.

And then, as the song glided away to a few moments of quiet, the wind died down, the rain calmed to a mere shower and the atmospheric theatrics moved well on. By the time “Shimin Kaihougun” was halfway through, it was as if there had never been any storm at all.

Yes, friends, NECRONOMIDOL’s music, whether by manifesting purest evil or by eliciting such a violent negative response from the gods of earth and sky themselves, summoned a storm.

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Naysayers will point out that it’s been hot as bloody hell in the ol’ capital region lately. It has! It’s been really, annoyingly, stinking hot, and big heat always brings bit humidity, and that confluence of forces sometimes mixes with other systems passing through to create these pop-up storms that, yeah, okay, they can last a comparative blink of an eye and still drop half an inch of rain on you before you even know it’s happening, and then they move on to follow the seam where hot and humid air is mixing with cooler stuff. That’s all true.

But you can’t convince me that a Necroma song about an escort of the dead didn’t draw that to me.