Hot Weather and High Water

In a little less than a week will be the day white man marks his independence and blatant tax evasion from the British Empire by virtue of the consumption of liberal libations, bar-b-ques, and the detonations of low-grade explosives. Because, after all, patriotism is defined by the blowing up of things, and not by the holding of alternative, and, sometimes, unpopular opinions, or being able to enjoy a conversation spanning the length and breadth of the Qu'ran, Kabbalahism, karma, tantra, biological evolution, and quantum physics, without having to worry about some doomsday zealot wanting to throw you in a hole, burn you at the stake in front of a lynch mob, or just shooting you in the back of head and having done with it.

For those reasons, I make a horrible patriot. Of course, by virtue of a spider's web made of cyber, I could be corresponding with someone from Borneo at the speed of thought. I hold some correspondence with a few cats across oceans and time itself. The old lines drawn in the sand by older empires seems rather irrelevant when one tries to look at the world as a whole. And besides, as an obscure British musician by the name of Bowie, would say;

"I'm afraid of Americans...
I'm afraid I can't help it..."

But that's another story entirely...

It's spitting distance to one of the major holidays of the summer season and there's still a fair amount of snow up upon the Roof of the World. The winter had been one not only of record, but of legend, in some places. Here in the high country of the pointy lands, rivers swell with waters the color mud and diamond as they race toward faraway oceans. In some areas, there has been bits of flooding, whilst in others, the threat of it looms like the specter of Rawhead and Bloody Bones, ready to spring at any moment, devouring the innocent without inhibition. There are sandbags and standing water.

This is quite the juxtaposition to places not but half of one-hundred miles and four-thousand vertical feet from my front door. Winds, from the deserts themselves, blow hot across the flatlands. There have been stories of great wildfires and places within the American Maghreb that have not seen rain in half a year. Even here, the mercury has read in the low eighties on the fahrenheit scale, which denotes quite the heatwave.

I like my juxtapositions and contradictions and paradoxes and dichotomies just fine, but I do find this state of things a little worrisome, perhaps bordering a little upon macabre...

It has been theorized that the reason we've not had proper floods, despite the high water, is the lack of rain. We're wet enough up here. A great many of us hope the afternoon storms do not begin their rounds until after runoff, which seems almost as unremitting as the winter that created it.

I am not the type to prey. Well, not unless it's in the context of the food chain. I do, however, allow myself to hope now and again. Presently, I do hope for rain, just not here. I hope that the afternoon storms do not form upon the Roof of the World, as is the custom, but a little further down, and that the water actually reaches those places of parched earth, instead of evaporating into virga phantasm long before touching the ground, giving the dry parts of the world a drink.  Prehaps even allowing for a little water-drunkenness.

After all, if for no other reason, there will be real live 'Mericians showing their patriotism by blowing shit up in less than a week, it would be a shame to see them catch the world afire by sheer negligence and by virtue dessication. It would also be nice to not hear meteorological doomsayers preach of end-times dry, but smile child-like at gentle drops and the sight of rainbows. Perhaps it is a small thing, but if I were the type to prey, in a context other than the food chain, I might just prey for, and upon, that.