Climate Change

Oh, this climate can’t change fast enough for me! Over the past 72 days, since the beginning of August, it’s rained 60 times here in northern New Jersey. It’s like south Vietnam up here. All the shrubbery in my backyard is twice as tall, trespassing onto the deck and throughout the yard. We’ve been infested with aggressive giant mosquitos nonstop, so bad that letting the dog out back for a five minute walk entails half a dozen bug bites. Acorns the size of golf balls in the road. Moss has carpeted my porch and garlanded the house’s foundation, and the land is so watersoaked I’m fearful that big oak tree in the south east corner is going to tip over into Patch’s bedroom.

Not to mention I’m starting to get sad. I mean, SAD. You know, that disease where the weather pisses you off. Er, depresses you.

That fall nip in the air, when any trace of humidity dissipates with the greens of the foliage, that’s what I want in lieu of this rain forest that’s straddled my state these three months now. That’s one of the things I enjoy best in life. I want to go apple and pumpkin picking with the girls this weekend but don’t want to get drenched like I’ve ran a half-marathon.

Now, New Jersey basically has a six-week fall and a six-week spring. Summers last four months and winters five. After fifty-one years, I’ve reconciled myself to that. But not this endless shower of rain. Can I walk from my car in the driveway to the front door without expecting a Bengal tiger – or a Viet Cong – or the Predator that stalked Arnold and pals – to rip me to shreds from the steamy overgrown jungle that’s my front yard?

Thank god I put my foot down fifteen years ago when the wife wanted to put a deposit on a house that required mandatory flood insurance. As a kid I remember my basement periodically flooding, remember my mother twisting water-drenched towels into buckets, remember fishing out my G.I. Joe dolls (salvageable) and the few comic books I ever owned (unsalvageable). And I thought, never again. I now live in a house on the middle of the hill, and in all the rain – probably 500 rainstorms or so over the years – it’s never once let a single drop into the basement.

[knocking furiously on the closest piece of wood he finds]

So the constant rain has given me a pounding headache. I’m grabbing something cheap and trashy to read and will be avoiding human contact for the rest of the night.

Carry on. And please, bring on the climate change!