Drought of 2007, The

Shall our artificial lizzids crawl back into the sea?

In a recent survey, 58 percent of All-Americans felt that they, as All-Americans, were entitled to regular rainfall patterns, and reported feelings of inadequacy when actual rainfall totals failed to match predictions. Respondents felt "dirty" or "humbled" or "parched" under such conditions. A startling 52 percent of All-Americans averred that their own personal moisture levels had declined during the Drought, feeling the need for lip balms, shoulder balms, hinge joint balms, and aerial bullhorn routines. As many as 17 percent had little opinion. Not that they had "No opinion." Rather, they had little opinion. This could be a result of The Short Term Profit Model or that 17 percent of respondents were little folk or plain old "Reticent in the Retina." As you can tell, the survey results added up to 127 percent, meaning that: Them dead people is rising from the grave in Chicago, and have cell phones, and have Discover Cards, and have balms, and the prospects is good for a Democrat in 2008, unless, of course, Republicans raise their own dead from the grave, in which case we'll see mayhem in the streets: Dead slaying Dead, etc. It used to be Brother vs. Brother in the Civil War, but in the Drought, Ladies and Gentlemen, it's Dead on Dead violence. We must note that, in The Literature, the globe (aka The Earth) (aka The Orb) (aka The Bonny Lea a Wee Bitteen from the Sun) is said to be warming. If our environment is warming, it would easily follow that we are warming, too. We: Us: People. Our body temperatures: Ninety nine, ninety nine point two. This is The New Normal, if you will. All the thermometers have been revised, which has been a boon to Some Economies and not Other Economies and has raised Some Eyebrows but not Other Eyebrows at the State Department. New directions have been issued which, through the use of GPS technology, can now guide the thermometer toward the proper orifice. Now, it does not go without saying, because we are saying it here, that Personal Warming can correlate, if we fudge the numbers just so, with Personal Drying. That is, with the Drought in place, people are feeling dryer now than at any time in Human History, even greater than The Amazing Dry of 1502, The Surprising Dry of 1101, and The Dry, Dry Oath of Biarritz (In progress). The globe is warming so We, The People, are warmer. The globe is drying so We, The People, are dryer. That is: Paltry sense of humor. Water may become the New Gold, and Les États-Unis may back its currency, we're told, with water. That is, each of us could march down to Fort Fricking Knox and demand a dollar's worth of water for each dollar we have in our measly little pockets, in God we trust, so help us God. Many more people -- 145 percent of All-Americans -- felt that, eventually, most creatures should be rained upon, with "eventually" taking on many disparate meanings. In some cases, "eventually" meant pastures and traffic signals and duck calls, and in other cases, "eventually" meant Manned Mars Project Cuisine. In a book I read as a boy, entitled Weather, which covered weather, and dealt, largely, with weather, a rather wordy narrator (employer: NOAA) in bluegray prose ridiculed rain dances and other "indigenous" practices, as if to say that The Man has had better ideas on causing rain to drop from the sky. When was the last time The Man caused so much as a condensation? Hasn't The Man done enough to the climate? Our best chance for drought abatement would be for Hurricane Bob to strike again: He has struck the U.S. mainland three times: 1979, 1985, and 1991, one of the only hurricanes in Human History to make repetitive landfalls. We can only hope that Bob will return. We can put tiaras on our children and train spy satellites on our mirror images and play Mozart with an orchestra of chainsaws -- and maybe, just maybe, we will hydrate this studio apartment we have here called Earth. Or maybe if all of us dance the Hydration. Drink up! Work it out! xo