Weather spirits seek revenge

This year's weather has been some of the craziest I have ever seen. My brother in DC walked around in 3 feet of snow after the storm shut down the area metro and forced them to hike across the bridge over the Potomac. My parents in Philadelphia had over 2 feet of snow on the ground for almost a month. Even Nashville received more snow than we've had since 2002. 8 inches may not be a lot for those of us hailing from the Northeast, but for a city with only a handful of snow plows and ice trucks? It shut things down completely.

Nashville was flooded May 1/2 in the craziest rains that I've ever witnessed. We had over a foot of water fall in two days, launching the city and surrounding areas into total disaster. My exit from the interstate was featured on national news - the one on I-24 with the "house" floating by. Yup, that was less than a mile from my home.

The good news? I live on a hill. I live on the 2nd story of an apartment complex on a hill, aptly named for being like the Chimney Top. I was fortunate. Many people across the state lost everything. Rivers, creeks, streams - everything turned into mayhem. Interstates were shut down, Vanderbilt even postponed the Monday finals for the students. It's being called a 100-year flood - meaning the type of natural disaster that only hits every century.

Now? Now we are slowly melting away beneath a heat that is crazier than anything we've seen in Nashville in years. I was amazed at the reading on my car earlier in the week - astounded that it was triple-digits in June. Later on the same drive home (at 6pm, mind you), I clocked another reading. This is with the air conditioning going and, presumably, cooling down the air right outside my car.

So I'm saying a big "we are sorry" to the weather spirits. I know that mankind has fucked up royally. We have an oil spill gushing thousands of barrels of poison into your ecosystems in the Gulf of Mexico. We have destroyed the protective ozone layers around the planet. We have stripped the forests bare. Whether this is revenge or not, I don't know. But I'm praying the extremes lessen before the next season changes.