We were discussing the weather, a popular topic these days. My neighbor Swamp Rabbit told me what the UN secretary-general had said: “The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived.”

“Great quote, but what about global flooding?” I asked. Swamp Rabbit laughed, so I informed him that hotter weather means more droughts but also heavier downpours when the rains come. That means more floods like the one that left two million people homeless in Pakistan last year. And sea levels are rising as ice melts at the poles.

We were on our way to sell renewable energy at a gay pride event on a brutally hot day. I was in a good mood because the crowds at pride events are generally more receptive to wind and solar options than, for instance, crowds at Celtic festivals, where the focus is on beer-drinking and bagpipes.

We stepped into the crowd. Famous divas lip-synced disco hits. Swamp Rabbit waved a tiny rainbow flag. Little Bo-Peep raised her shepherd’s cane to greet the Gimp from Pulp Fiction and the bearded ballerina at the other end of his leash. A sudden rain shower chased us through the sculpture garden to the gallery. I looked around for coffee, but none of the food vendors had any.

Swamp Rabbit was miffed. He wanted me to walk across the grassy field to meet Varinia, his artist/shopkeeper friend, but I never meet anyone until I’ve had my coffee. We were in a wealthy suburb of Philadelphia – Abington, I think. I drove to the nearest convenience store, more than a mile away.

When I got back, the shower had become a steady downpour. The show was over. Swamp Rabbit jumped into my car and scolded me for drinking coffee while driving. I took an alternate route back to South Philly with the idea of avoiding the sort of flash floods that had skirted New York City a few weeks earlier.

“The ocean will have us all,” I said, quoting an old John Cale song.

Swamp Rabbit told me I was crazy. A heat dome was still hanging over much of the country. Wildfires were burning all the boreal forests in Canada and were devastating Maui.

“The fires will have us, not the floods,” he said.

Lightning flashed as we argued. The rain stopped, but a pickup truck at Broad and Erie almost demolished us when I blew through a stop sign.

“Way to go,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Keep driving like that and you won’t have to worry about the weather no more.”