We have 39 more days of this?

I feel like Shem, no wait… Japheth, he was the funny one, on days like today. I drove to work after lunch and was assaulted by water. H20 and lots of it. At the bottom of every hill was a giant two lane puddle in the road.

On Kingsley I saw the water push up and aside a manhole cover. I know what your thinking, "No big deal, the ninja turtles move those aside with one hand." But in the real world they are very heavy and to be forced up by water pressure is amazing.

There were people driving 5 mph with their emergency blinkers on in the center lane. People were flipping out. I can only imagine how the inhabitants of the world in Noah's time felt when the heavy rains began...

My day started well. Ham was cross checking his list of animals. Two pairs of everything... and 7 of the clean animals. Ham was always forgetting there had to be 7 of the clean animals. He just kept concentrating on the twozy twozy and forgot the septuzy septuzy. Of course, dad's golden boy Shem has the easy job, triple checking the gopher wood for holes. But dad had given me a very important job.

"Japheth," He said in his dad voice, "you have a very important job." I told you he gave me an important job. "Take this," he said. And by “this” he meant an oxgoad. An oxgoad is a long stick with a metal tip used to move herd animals around. "I'd like you to..."

"Loading the ox?"

"Can I finish what I was saying?"

"I just thought I was..."

"Can I finish!?" He pauses for a long time giving me the dad-eye until he was certain I'd let him finish. "I want you to use this to beat back all the people who want to get on the ark. If they make it onboard we'll capsize and all of us will die."

"What?"

"If anyone tries to get on the ark hit them with the pointy bit."

"Won't that hurt?"

"Yes, it will but because..."

"Then why..."

"Can I finish!?" Another long pause. "It will hurt but because they are all going to drown to death it doesn't really matter." I just nodded, he wasn't in the mood to hear that drown to death was a redundancy, but look who I'm talking about; every other animal on the ark is a redundancy.

Later that morning the rains began. I had never seen rain. Nobody had. It was panic, bedlam, mass hysteria, dogs and cats living together. I would have said it was a disaster of “Biblical proportions” but the Bible had not been written yet, and the disaster we were in would set the high water mark (literally) for what a “Biblical proportion” could be. Since I couldn’t say that, I just said, "It's a disaster."

People wigged out at first, but after 12 hours they calmed down. It was just water. We didn't have paved roads or artificial parking lots to funnel water into annoying places so most of it just ran down the hill. Of course the people at the bottom of the hill were upset (all their stuff was wet you see). But the people on the top of hill didn't mind so much. People just moved uphill and hoped to wait it out.

It was about 5pm when people started to come to see Noah. They had all laughed at our ark. They said: “Who needs an ark?” “What’s an Ark” and “You guys are stupid.” But not always in that order. Well when they saw that gopher wood floated but their houses did not, they started to change their tune. Dad told them to leave as the other two boys loaded the luggage. (Luggage for 4 women can be quite extensive. Although this time I didn’t blame my wife because how do you pack for Armageddon.)

So there I was with the oxgoad and an angry mob quickly forming. Old Methuselah was there, he was older than anyone and said he’d never learned how to swim and “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” Although I don’t think that is always the case it was true in his.

About this time some able bodied young men tried to push their way onboard. I had tried to tell them to change their lives, I’d invited them to help us build the ark and make a space onboard for them but they had laughed. Now I had to clobber them about the head and shoulders with the oxgoad. They said things like: “Ouch! that hurts.” “This isn’t funny Japheth.” And “We are all gunna die.” But not always in that order.

After it became clear that my Shaolin oxgoad skills were too sweet for them to bully their way onboard they doggie paddle to a different hill and set about cutting down gopher trees.

The next challenge was much harder. As Noah and my brother made final preparations, single women from the village came and approached me looking for passage. Of course they had not given me the time of day years ago but my father always said, “Girls don’t like boys, girls like Arks and Money.” Well they must have thought I had a million bucks. (Actually we only had two bucks, technically one buck and one doe. Maybe I should have made a dough/doe pun instead. Oh, well, too late, bygones and so forth.)

Anyway, they tried to be all seductive and I honestly had the hardest time remembering why we could only fit 8 people onboard a boat carrying thousands of other animals. But in the end all the rain had made their make-up run, I snapped out of it and I just bludgeoned them about the head and shoulders with my oxgoad. They swam away and procured a space on bully’s raft. (It was a flimsy 4x8 structure. Also, in a misguided attempt to copy us they decided to load it with two of each kind of rock and pebble.)

But my trials were not over. When the single women left the married couples with kids approached me. By this time the water was up to bottom edge of the ark and Noah was busy counting mosquitoes, viruses, and head lice in his microscope. Apparently we had temporarily misplaced the common cold but it was found with the hippo.

Anyway the married couples were smarter than the bullies and the single chicks. They appealed to me to leave them behind and take their children. This was a tough decision. I tried to relieve the tension by saying, “We don’t need any children, we already have enough meat for the puma.” But of course the humor of this remark was lost on them. I held fast, I knew the rules, nobody on board.

Women held up babies by the hundred each making claims about their child: “He’ll cure the common cold one day” “He may be a great artist” and “The kids going to be a soccer player, he is!” But not always in that order. Fathers tried explaining that they were the guilty ones and deserved punishment, but not their kids. They did nothing wrong. I had to agree, it was harsh, but it wasn’t my call to make. Each of them had a chance to make the same decisions my family did but they didn’t.

In the end I had to beat them about the head and shoulders with my oxgoad. I tried not to take pleasure in beating up women and children, it was hard but I succeeded by concentrating on taking pleasure in beating up the men.

About this time I stepped inside and God closed the ark door shut. The villagers we all standing in waist deep water around the ark looking up and yelling things like: “This isn’t fair!” “You are not the boss of me!” and “We have 39 more days of this.” But not always in that order.

It is raining today.