Water

So I'm out in the back yard blackening my fingers with the sap from pine branches that snapped and fell during the recent ice storm. It's 50 degrees and sunny outside - in January, in Ohio - and I'm digging the chance to be outside, breathe fresh air, clean up the yard, strip the branches, and use the needles (in Georgia it's "pine straw") to mulch flower beds. It's a win-win situation. Brought about by a Christmas Eve snowstorm, followed by an ice storm that left half a million people without power for days. Followed by a week of rain that flooded several river-valley communities that are still trying to dry out. And we in middle Amerika got off easy. If weather is a global phenomenon, our storms were connected to more severe seismic events on the opposite side of the planet that produced truly awesome, terrible waves.

I'm just imagining, without meteorological facts to back it up, a sudden crunching crack in the crust at the bottom of the Indian Ocean, releasing energy that had been building up for a long time, that pushed real hard against a huge mass of water in direct contact with said crust. Like a chiropractic adjustment that alters the position of all the tissues around it, this local jolt sends a wave radiating outward that doesn't stop until it hits something solid, like half of South and Southeast Asia and part of Africa. But it doesn't stop there either, because the shock waves, like the butterfly effect, radiate through the ground and into the atmosphere, as well as through the ocean, and pretty soon I'm mulching my garden with volunteer pinestraw. There but for fortune.

So I ask you, dear reader, am I hallucinating from the effects of this really great pine tar?