Yesterday at about 5:30 AM the rain started to come down in force. I was woken up by lightning and huge, deafening crashes of thunder. I leaned over and closed my window before my room got wet and went back to sleep. I got up and took a shower as the rain continued to come down. It began to slack at about 8:30, and I left for work. This summer, we've been suffering a drought, and it looks like this was the time for it to break. The 1,2,3,9 lines have been put out of commission by lighting strikes. The Metro-North railroad was flooded out. The buses were running on irregular schedules, packed sardine-full of commuters with no other options. I walked the 40 blocks to work in a mass of umbrella-toting businesspeople yakking frantically on their cellular phones complaining about the indignity. A water main broke on FDR Drive and submerged cars. Geysers spouted out of manholes twenty feet into the air. So far, no deaths that I've heard of, but we'll see. This is as close as we've gotten so far to the end of the world, and it was caused by a mere morning's rain. I really don't know how this city would handle a full-blown apocalypse. I'm sure it's not going to be pretty.