The rain was exploding around me, almost overpowering me, it seemed a struggle just to stay sitting up.  I’d felt the presence of every molecule of water, as I imagined the trip the vapor had made from somewhere in the Rockies.  Soon collected into the gathering thunderstorm across the plains and now totally immersing me, wet, warm, symphonic in its energy.  I could see the lightning, but the thunder was inaudible, yet viscerally impacting my body.  I suddenly became aware that I was wearing sunglasses as I looked across my small yard sloping downward toward the Missouri river.  The old, chipped, weathered cement staircase to nowhere, now my focus as it gathered water and herded it on its never ending cycle, predating, and in all likelihood, postdating my time on the planet, awesome in its force, especially in my exhausted reverie.

I wasn’t sure how long I’d been sitting here, in a lawn chair chaise, shirtless, wearing cutoffs and Birkenstocks.  Each raindrop seemed cataclysmic in its demise, yet time suspended as my mind seemed to hold and contemplate their individual, and finally, collective fate.  It had to have been over 30 hours, but a watch would’ve been useless by now.   From the dead zone that was where the night before was a recent memory, before the new day was really realized, the extension of this madness now launching me into the classic late afternoon thunderstorm in eastern Nebraska.  I had the faint, distant realization of a tape I had of the Grateful Dead at Red Rocks in ’84 playing somewhere in my apartment.  “Wake up to find that you are the eyes of the world..” Freak On.