Polar Express

Last night I was on the way home from my writers' group. There I had been, thinking about how nice it was to sit in a room with a bunch of other playwrights and discuss each other's work. No one HAD to be there, and the world wasn't going to depend on the outcome of the meeting. As seriously as we all take writing, it was nice to just be there simply because we enjoy it. Then I get in my car and turn on the radio...

The radio program was in the middle of an interview with Richard Ellis about his book On Thin Ice: The Changing World of the Polar Bear. Okay, I thought, polar bears... yeah, I know all about them. Ice caps are melting... water is warming... but we're fixing it and we're making it better. Hybrid cars, wind power, recycling... we're on it, right? Well, the way I understood it in this interview was that the cycle of the ice caps melting is such that once, say, part of the ice caps melt, more sunlight hits the water. When more sun hits the water, the water warms and more ice caps melt. More sunlight hits the water and on and on. So, as Ellis says, even if all the bad stuff stopped tomorrow, this process is unstoppable.

I know... it kind of makes you want to go eat some chocolate or do a facial mask or something just to make yourself feel better. I know I wanted to go back to my playwright buds and pretend that the worst problem in my life was that my dialogue didn't ring true.

But my thing is water... so why am I putting all this on my shoulders? Because I don't want to get to the point when there is nothing we can do about this problem of decreasing water supply. I don't want to sit around and wait for some nerd to develop a desalination machine just like I thought that someone would build an underwater air conditioner for the North Pole. I don't want to be turning on the radio in 20 years - this time on my way home from opening night of my off-b'way play, of course - and hear some dude tell me that the water crisis is unstoppable. Or worse, I don't want my KID turning on the radio and hear this problem is unstoppable and then think, "jeez, my parent's generation is the biggest bunch of jackasses for not taking care of this problem when there was still time to fix it." (No comment as to whether that's the thought I had).

Okay, so this is a preachy entry. Tomorrow I promise to write the blog equivalent of a fart joke about saving water in my house. But, for now, I felt like I needed to write some dialogue that rang true.