Rainy days and flooding in New Jersey. Flooding? I never knew New Jersey to have so much flooding. Over the years while in San Francisco, I remember hearing news reports of flooding in New Jersey and thought it odd. Now I think it has something to do with changes in the world climate.

I imagine being a satellite in an imaginary orbit fixed above the sunlit portion of the Earth, so that I'm constantly looking down at daytime activity all over the world. Towards my left is always activity during sunrise, to my right is always activity at dusk, the sun always behind me, and right below me is everything in between. Activity like ants scurrying.

I'm waiting for nature to run its course and decimate huge swaths of the human population within the next few hundred years. Not that I'm rooting for it, I just think it's natural and inevitable. Rampant human growth, egged on by global corporatization and industrial economics (uneven distribution of wealth and decision-making power), might be an affront to nature. We are driven to dominate it, ignore it, abuse it, but with humanity vs. nature in the boxing ring, I place my money on nature.

I think of the Earth as a living being, a body, and we are bacteria or a virus or whatever. I ain't no doc. As long as we're benign to it, it has no problem with us as parasites. But once we start attacking its vital functions, its ability to breathe or to process fluids or change it's surface (glaciers and ice caps melting), its natural functions will start working to eliminate the infection.

In a way, maybe I shouldn't care what we're doing to the environment. We can't destroy the environment, we can only destroy ourselves. Climate change, ocean levels rising, erratic violent weather, virulent, resistant diseases, global food shortage, maybe even war, but war is really small beans. Only we can be destroyed, and once we're destroyed or reduced to manageable populations with perhaps wiser administration of our being, the environment will rebound and heal itself.

Ha! Even when I'm not writing about myself I'm a barrel of laughs! I don't think of it as something to get depressed or frustrated over, even if it did happen within generations. Things happen, they pass, our history, our existence, it comes and it goes. And it's no reason to stop recycling or avoid driving cars, even though New Jersey doesn't seem to take recycling seriously enough (what? really? -ed.) and I'm learning the meaning of "you can't live there without a car".

Flooding in New Jersey is small beans. No one died. Not like in concurrent flooding in Niigata, Japan where 30 people have already died, or concurrent flooding in India where hundreds of people have died. Even so, it's just symptoms. The water will recede, insurance will get paid, dead will be burned or buried if found. Just go on.