Thursday, May 03, 2007

Rainy Day Thoughts

It’s finally raining here in Lethbridge. Good thing, too, since my wife bought a rain barrel yesterday afternoon. Hey, free water. It might take a few months for it to pay for itself, but it will somewhere down the line.

Cold, grey, rainy…can it get any better than that? I’m serious. There’s something about the damp weather that brings out my inner guru. I write more quickly. I read more deeply. And I daydream more vividly.

Maybe I’m Irish at heart. Or maybe I should move to Vancouver. But I know that my wife finds the perpetual rain soul-crushing, akin to six months of darkness in the far north. Even if folks on west-coast brag about wearing shorts in February while we out here in chilly Alberta are defrosting our mukluks.

Perhaps the clouds make the universe seem smaller, less daunting; and myself, larger and less insignificant.

I could say something pious, like water reminds me of baptism, and I remember with thanksgiving what Jesus did for me and for the world. I could say that, but I think Jesus chokes on saccharine piety, preferring the real thing over the imitation.

I do know that I breathe a heavy sigh of relief every time the sky clouds over. After watching An Inconvenient Truth, I break out in hives every time the temperature turns red.

I live in the centre of the climate-change denying universe. Most people I encounter who deny climate change usually have an economic interest in believing that most of the world’s climatologists have been smoking too much ganja.

But those who deny climate change are like playing the slots with their children’s mortgage. If we tackle the issue of climate change and it turns out to be a cyclical phenomenon, then hey, no real harm done, but we will have cleaner air and we’ll start treating the earth more like a priceless treasure and less like a rental car.

But if we do nothing, and keep on doing what we’re doing, and it turns out all those hookah-smoking hippies were RIGHT, then we have no one to blame but ourselves.

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