Oh my. It was only six years ago that a drought had everyone thinking that the entirety of the Lone Star State would soon be reduced to arid desert and we’d all be living in some sort of cowboy-booted version of Mad Max with souped-up pickup trucks and off-road vehicles – well, to some degree, you already live that if you drive on I-35 or Mopac pretty much any time of the day or night.

Of course, these errant Cassandras were mostly yankees and Kalifornians who moved here to get a cheap cost of living for themselves and run it up for everyone else, and who really don’t know shit from Shinola – as folks in a certain Cosmic Cowboy’s coterie like to say. And what the hell is Shinola, anyway??

Anyway…. I digress…

Ya see, any idiot, like me for instance, can look at a map and see that Austin is a mere 150 miles or so from the Gulf of Mexico, one of the warmest, if not the warmest, bodies of water on the planet. In fact, with that little inconvenience that I shall not name – thank you Mr. Gore – the water temperature in the Gulf has been rising like mad over the last couple of decades. Any third grader can tell you that that leads to evaporation which leads to mugginess which leads to clouds which leads to rain, and it all gets blown right over Galveston and into the Texas interior by that little phenomenon known as the Gulf jet-stream. It is the reason Texas and the middle of the country are so gosh darn sticky in the summer. Thank you.

Ergo, if the wonderful, the beautiful, the bad and the mad Republic is going to meet its apocalypse, it will more likely be Waterworld (yeah, shitty movie, sorry) than Mad Max. I’m afraid Harvey is just the beginning. Things will only get soggier until the next high pressure ridge predominates for a year or two and everything dries out before the Gulf jet-stream takes over again and returns southeast Texas to the bottom of the ocean where it belongs, and Austin becomes prime beachfront property.

Let’s face it. Houston sucks. No one will miss it, and its only saving grace, to wit, Houstonians, will become Austinites and San Antonioans, and maybe become a little more gracious and civilized. One can only hope.

Yeah, I’m a snob.

So what happen in Austin this week? Well, the Gulf of Mexico had its influence on events. Rain!!! Here are some pics.