Karma and Crop Circles

With the 'silly season' nearly upon us, it occurred to me the other day that we haven't had any reports of crop circles so far this summer that I can recall. Still, I suppose that it must be difficult to create them when the fields are under several feet of water. Besides, the hoaxers probably had other things on their minds - like baling out their flooded houses. Of course, I could be proven completely wrong - when the flood water recedes completely, perhaps there will be mysterious symbols will be revealed in the fields as they drain. No doubt the conspiracy theorists will claim that the floods we've suffered were caused by aliens - they got fed up with having those symbols in the corn ridiculed and dismissed a fakes, and decided to go for a more dramatic method of attracting our attention. Then again, perhaps those crop circles were some kind of warning telling us to beware of flooding...

Mind you, I'm in no position to mock people clinging to irrational belief systems, attributing cause and effect arbitrarily. Just lately I've found myself suspecting that I've been the victim of 'karma'. For some reason I started attributing my recent run of very painful ill-health (tooth infections, kidney stones, etc.) to cosmic pay back for a fairly bad thing I did not long before I was struck down. Now, I don't want to go into what it was I did that was so bad (there's always the chance I might still be prosecuted), but suffice to say that it wasn't murder, arson, rape or anything really bad. Nobody got hurt, no property was actually destroyed. It was anti-social more than outright criminal. Getting back to the point, this obsession with the idea that I was paying the price for my misdemeanor flew in the face of reason by completely ignoring the fact that I'd been having problems with the tooth that got infected since last Christmas, long before the incident in question. The fact is that guilt can drive even the most rational of us into harbouring the most irrational of ideas. Scary.