I am woken this early evening by a thunderstorm.  It should be no cause for alarm.  I have heard the rolling roar of these storms for the better part of four decades now.  The flashes of white illuminating the night.  The torrents of wind-blown rain beating out an improvised base track.  The storms are things of beauty.  A spectacle one should be used to in Michigan.  But it is January.  Just after the New Year.  This has been a land dedicated to icy grays and whites from the first gales of November until the rains of March and April.  And this storm disturbs me so.

These last few years.  We here, those aging who do not sleep like the dead, are now forced to grow accustom to the thunder in January.  It is hard.  Hard to adapt.  I am dry in my McMansion.  But the existence of this storm does not rest well on the mind.  I imagine the mind of the polar bear swimming to oblivion.  He has no theoretical construct to explain these changes.  And tonight I share his unrest.
These storms make me uneasy.  But this one in particular has forced me out of the bed.  Led me here to record my thoughts.  One tiny organism on a planet of bountiful diversity.  In a seemingly boundless Universe.  Perhaps in an ocean of countless Universes.  This is an intense storm.  The lightning and thunder have passed now.  But the rain pounds on.  Erasing all trace of snow from the ground.  And it makes me sick and fearful.

I have traveled much these last years.  Talked with the many taxi drivers of the world who escort me in my life of privilege.  These men are the living eyes of this planet.  And they see what I know already in my heart.  They are unsettled.  Summer is too hot.  Too dry.  Distinct seasons are jumbled.  Muddled like runny watercolors.  You can hear the despair of it all in their grunts and sighs, no matter the language barrier.

Thunderstorms are so vast.  To see them rise above a pastoral middle-western vista.  They can break so viciously.  Snapping hundred year-old trunks like twigs – sending them randomly to crush the trappings of our lives.  The storms have the ability to teach us all our place in the cosmos, lest we momentarily forget that we are a part of something much larger.  And they are perhaps the least of their brethren at the disposal of mother Earth – the Blizzard, the Hurricane, the Tsunami, the Volcano, the Earthquake, the Tornado.  All able to humble mankind.  Able to make the greatest among us acknowledge we are insignificant.  Transient.  But at least these natural forces have given us the illusion of predictability.  That we might believe we can anticipate them.  The approximate where or when of their arrival.  And though they may kill, the relative predictability of them – it allows me to function these many years without much of a qualm.

Not so this January storm.  It is wrong.  It is out of place.  It is we who have disturbed the rhythms of our great home.  And the thunder tonight sounds very much like the growl of a great, prodded beast bent on extracting revenge.  The voice of it.  It is telling me, as I tried to ignore it in sleep, that we are much too late to check our hubris.  I think of my children in the rooms next to mine.  They are swimming to oblivion, though their youth lets them sleep.

I think too, of all the symbols in the year just ended, that have been screaming to me.  Telling me that all is so far from well.  That humanity is so unable to cope with what it has wrought.  I am disturbed this year.  By the artists around me.  Who have captured glimpses of what we all know.  And shoved them upon me.  It is these images that finally make be sigh.  I can no longer sleep.

I see the eyes of Tommy Lee Jones, deeply lined, as he drones out his last lines in No Country For Old Men.  I was stunned by the movie.  Haunted.  I did not realize the author until this last scene.  But felt the reality of his message.  Cormac McCarthy.  There is the bastard who has conspired with this storm to keep me awake.

I read The Road in the fall.  I have not been quite right since.  I cannot get the images from my mind.  He made the unthinkable commonplace.  And so true.  Every day since, I can feel the very thin fabric of society that keeps us from total chaos.  It is a dainty garment.  We are tearing it away.  Our own excess.  Our own greed.  There are ten or twenty crises which could stop trucks from reaching the supermarkets.  And how civil are we then?  I think of my children every day.  Mankind has come such a long way from its evolutionary-biological roots.  I just do not see us as a nurturing troop of primates.  When it is over – the devolution into some semi-chaotic state cannot end well.

In the same vein, Blindness, by Jose Saramago.  Or last year’s Children of Men by Alfonso Cauron.  The dread oozing from these works of art.  It strikes at me.  They are all picking ideas from the same ether I breathe.  I cannot see it as chance on a night like tonight.  I am so tempted to reach out to the cotton candy of hope and change offered by some Bobby Kennedy clone.  Hope that it could at least help me dream through this darkness.

I have at least written myself sleepy.  Off to dream.  Happy New Year friends.