I concede, of course, that we needed the rain. Setting aside the fact that this many people shouldn't be living in an area devoid of its own large-scale water supply in the first place, it hasn't rained "normally" through the section of the west coast of the United States in the past three years, at least not in the quantities required to replenish not just reservoirs but actual rivers. As a result, in a stunning collective action, water supplies decided all this human-life-sustaining labor was not for them and have gone on strike by ceasing to be recognizable as functioning bodies of water. I see this first-hand as I live right next to one of them. Instead of a biome-defining watershed, my local watering hole been obsessed for three years with perfecting its impersonation of Rudy Giuliani: brown, fragile, damp, a wispy echo of its former self, with no measurable depth. I'm willing to hear arguments over which has been shit on by more birds.
But the thing is, it really has rained normally in the last three years. With the exception of a couple of ill-conceived sojourns to some of America's worst states* back when I was too small to legally object, I've lived in Southern California for nearly all of my nearly 50 years as a higher-order mammal with a reasoning brain capable of discriminating comparison and abstract analysis. Don't misunderstand, I'm still very aware that I'm also capable of being entertained by a cartoon show based on an online Dungeons and Dragons stream, so this isn't me big-upping myself, I'm just saying I have the basic capacity to notice stuff over time, like for example how this is like the ninth or tenth cycle of SEVERE! drought in Southern California in my lifetime. At a certain point it stops being an emergency and it's just how it fucking works
And it's not like nobody noticed. They made a whole-ass Jack Nicholson movie about water shenanigans that came out the year I was born but was set in the 1930s. The Tongva, the Chumash, the Cahuilla, the Payómkawichum, the Acjachemen, all the other peoples I'm leaving out who were here first, figuring out how to make it work in this pleasant but ultimately pretty challenging desert and desert-adjacent environment, had the right idea: low population, move around as needed, don't fuck with stuff any more than you have to. Then some Europeans showed up and realized that, by comparison to all the other shit places they were stuck originating from, this spot with no seasonal humidity, snow-free winters and long strands of uninterrupted beachfront would be pretty sweet for a little colonization and exploitation to the point of untenability. You know, in exactly the sort of Euro-mercantile-capitalist way that made them have to look outside of their whole smelly, grotty, rolled-up-tissue of a continent for living space in the first place.
And look, just a few hundred years, a couple of pandemics and some earthquakes later, we're all happy we got a little rain. All that work for this much stress just so people can, absurdly, try to keep green grass in a Mediterranean environment. It's all stupid.
You know who doesn't try to keep green grass? The guy typing this. Is it because I'm a water-conscious forward-thinking green? Maybe accidentally, but mostly it's because I think yardwork is living death. My ex wife loved (and reported still does, she's fine, I'm happy to say!) gardening and weeding and maintaining all that shit, while to me it felt like weekend after weekend of repetitive chores I cared zero percent about and would only occupy my mind and body until I looked up one day and I was out of time to live an actual life. So once she moved out, the lawn in the front was allowed to die in the last drought, replaced by drought-tolerant plants which have all coincidentally died since planting because of a) this environment laughs at what you label-makers think "drought resistant" means and b) my utter, shattering indifference. And the lawn in the back, where nobody can see it, not even the fucking HOA? Yeah, that died entirely and the sprinklers were cut. I haven't mowed a lawn since 2010 and I've never been happier.
The problem? It rained a lot this year so far. Great for us regionally and survivability-wise, right after we wade through the short-term apocalyptic consequences, which is the scale we do everything at in California: total absence or cataclysm, no in between. The result here was that my tiny patch of backyard dirt in the back yard that I can happily ignore was weeds up to the knees in the space of about three weeks.
So cool, that means for the first time in about five years, I had to go outside and do yard work. Which I'm still mad about. I'm not saying necessarily that I would trade another year of merciless drought over like 10 western states for a reprieve from trying to remember how to operate a hula hoe, I'm just saying I wouldn't not think about it first.
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*Oregon was OK, but Michigan and Arizona... I can't say I really understood my mother's thinking through that period, except maybe her self-esteem wasn't in the most robust shape.
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