RAINY DAYS HAVE THEIR OWN CHARM.

Byline: TAD CRONN

HAVE you ever noticed how dysfunctional Southern Californians' relationship with water is?

Gripped by some sort of insanity, we, or our ancestors, decided it would be a bright idea to move to an arid region of deserts and chaparral. Merely as a practical matter, one would think that the occasional wet year would be seen as a blessing from on high to a parched people.

But instead, we folk of the low-flow toilets view the rain as we would an ill-mannered guest, to be ushered out of the household as swiftly as possible. Rain is to Los Angeles what the Visigoths once were to Rome: an unpredictable, dripping rampage of destructive inconvenience that always catches us unprepared. (Albeit, even polluted, the L.A. rain generally smells better than a dripping Visigoth).

It's not like we're ignorant of water's potential for creating havoc. But like an abused spouse who keeps returning home with a peace offering of Scotch and Bourbon, we seem to invite torrential disaster.

We'd rather risk our homes and workplaces floating away than bother to build sensible drainage for the floods we know will eventually come.

Better to hydroplane at 80 miles per hour than slow down and admit nature's soggy power over us.

Come, let us shake our fists at the sky and defy the heavens themselves by building flat roofs on every house, office and grocery store as far as the eye can see!

I went to dinner in Venice recently with a couple of co-workers from Tampa, Fla. It was one of those restaurants about a block from the sand, which was hidden from view by a solid row of aging, multistory apartments. I don't know if Californians are born with the ability to sense the presence of the ocean, or if we develop it over time. But my surf sense was all a-tingle, the air thick with the essence of salt.

My acquaintances, who were to return to Florida the next day, may have bemoaned the fact that they had come all the way to California and not seen the ocean, but little did they realize they were participating in a long-standing West Coast tradition of avoiding water at all costs.

Think about it. When was the last time you swam in the local ocean? Unless you're wrapped in a wet suit or a layer of insulating blubber (as so many of us are), you risk hypothermia by dipping so much as a little toe in the waves.

No, our beaches are only good for sunburning and feeding sea gulls.

(On the plus side, you do run less risk of shark attack at Left Coast beaches than you do in Florida. Not because our sharks are any tamer, mind you, they're all too busy huddling together for warmth to bother the tourists.)

We don't even like to drink H2O, unless it's bottled or carbonated, with its bland taste masked by semi-poisonous minerals. Better still, junk it up with caffeine and ``natural'' ingredients until you re-create Dr. Jekyll's high-energy sports drink.

This same indolent neglect of the first element extends to the more ``macro'' worldview of city planners and developers who have, over the years, never quite found the time to build enough reservoirs or treatment facilities to catch even a fraction of our occasional floods and see us through the drought years.

Toilet to tap? How about deluge to dishwasher and you keep your low-flow faucets?

Personally, I don't get it. Everyone I know gripes about the rain and yearns for sunny days.

Not me. Give me a cloudy sky spouting like a waterfall.

I love rain: The icy-needles-in-your-face chill of it; theoh-my-Volkswagen-is-sliding-under-the-belly-of-a-toxic-waste-hauling-tanker-truck slipperiness of it; that refreshing quality that b cock-and-Red-Bull vitamin drink.

I enjoy the way it cleans the air, turns the hills green, and makes the flowers and beach bunnies blossom.

Rain reminds me that for all our egotistical fantasies about power to control weather and climate, we are helpless as infants in the face of fierce nature.

So, as the rains fade away to the inevitable clear skies, the L.A. River begins to look a little less like the world's biggest water slide, and the steam starts to curl upward from sun-warmed pavement, I can only chide my fellow besprinkled Angelenos: There's more where that came from.