"Troubles", Right Here in River City

The world is too much with us; late and soon
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

Training jets scream over the playful rap of dogs chasing and being chased in circles, round and round and round again. Sitting in the backyard, taking a personal "sick" day, and it's more than sinus congestion and urban infections that plague body and soul. Lord, I suspect today I'm just feeling...old.

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.

As I sit here with dogs and birds and shade and Wordsworth and the endless whine of rubber tires on ancient asphalt, two issues are all the talk around River City Facebook circles. Clean water and new schools.

We're one week out from a bond election that would finance school infrastructure projects, and my old-age absentee ballot lies where it landed by snail mail a month ago. 
My mind has flipped and reflipped over this one so many times; let's just say I'm torn, still, on this one.

Lazlo leaps into my lap! Ah, the joys of writing outdoors. His primary issue is a simple, "Play with me!"

The other, perhaps more pressing, certainly more distressing issue is the water thing. As noted here more than once, River City may soon -- as in a matter of two or three years -- run out of water.

Now, too many folks have entangled the water issue with the school bond issue. These two are linked purely by coincidence and timing. The school bond is a school district issue; water is a city issue. Passage of the school bond  will not affect River City's water supply nor the lack thereof.

Yet, one still hears (reads), "Well! What good is a multimillion dollar megaschool gonna do us if there no water to drink! Huh? You'd think 'they'ed have sense enough to use that money to build another lake!"

Build another lake. Building another lake as a municipal water resource absolutely cannot be done with school district money. Period. End of discussion.

Build another lake. I could get in my car right now and drive to no less than half a dozen lakes within a couple of hours that are all but dried out. So long as this drought continues, folks, what good would another multimillion dollar -- NOT school money -- dry hole in the prairie do us, huh?

Then, too, there are no end of "dead horse" floggers. They SHOULDA built that lake when they had the chance! They COULDA let the Corp of Engineers dredge the old lake for free! We all WOULDA been a lot better off now if they hadn't been running things back then!

WOULDA, COULDA, SHOULDA never solved a damn thing, People. We need creative, thoughtful, workable solutions to meeting our water crisis going forward, not reliving old sins from the past.

Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, 
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.