Insert Foot had a weird dream about the drought.

I finally saw my first social media water-shaming video last week. It was glorious.

I watched a man turning on his sprinklers in early afternoon here in Northern California. Which, lately, has felt a lot like early afternoon on Tatooine. The person with the phone, an acquaintance, offered some informative play-by-play, including time of day, date, location and the fact it’s “bleeping” hot and that California is running out of “bleeping” water.

Indeed. Double indeed.

With a bit of creativity, we could be onto something. Reality shows, live coverage and office pools. I hope the trend takes off like a California wildfire lacking the water we no longer have to put it out.

Though shaming of almost any kind is typically reprehensible, promoting awfulness like classism, elitism, glass-house hypocrisy and other traits typically found in house cats and the worst people, this is an exception.

Water-shaming should be encouraged when the tan (and getting tanner) good-looking folks of the western United States are going to be wearing stillsuits from “Dune” a year from now. If you’re not a sci-fi fan and find some types of white wine beneath you, I promise you won’t like where stillsuit water comes from.

But, really, keep watering your giant and fantastic lawns during our drought. Turn the pressure high enough to include the sidewalk. It looks parched. Show the world superior water can still run down the gutters of California when it’s barely rained in 10 months. Let the peasants eat cake and enjoy the glorious summer aroma of wet concrete.

And people will capture your selfish and wasteful acts on video and put it on the Internet for the masses to ridicule, where it belongs.

Stop being stupid. Kill your lawn and plant things that look good in the desert. Wear a tuxedo and pretend you’re Frank Sinatra in Palm Springs. Stop playing golf until brown becomes the new green. Stop building giant pools to impress someone flying overhead. At least shrink them. Swim laps at the gym.

Scarcity just widens the gaps between us, and it’s not the well-off who will go unshowered and thirsty. It’s like the infamous photo of Paris Hilton spraying her brand of perfume on poor Brown children – a nutshell shot of the extreme capitalism that’s going to get worse as resources go dry.

I don’t mean to sound like the pinko-vegan, reefer-chewing, tree-humping socialist gun stealers your Republican uncle warned you about. But it won’t be long until we peasants have to rely on the kindness of the privileged to spray a little water our way. Literal trickle-down theory that didn’t work the first time.

We’re running out, period. The water level at the biggest U.S. reservoir, Lake Mead – which provides water for seven states, tribal lands and northern Mexico – has dropped 170 feet since 2000. Another year of the worst drought of our lifetimes will lower Lake Mead to below the level it spins the turbines and makes electricity for Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Phoenix and San Diego, among others.

Hopefully, someone can quickly figure out how humans can drink saltwater, because we’re about to have more than plenty of that. Like, a lot more. Like, Bakersfield-by-the-sea amounts.

Though I giggled at the stupid video of someone’s idiot neighbor meticulously trying to keep his lawn green, this is no time to laugh. Not after last week, when California became a real sci-fi movie.

At one point, when I couldn’t turn on my air-conditioner because PG&E said rolling blackouts will deprive elderly people with emphysema of their electric-powered oxygen, I gave up and jumped in a cold shower to keep from dying. I like old people. After my last birthday, I may have to start dating them pretty soon, and I would hate to kill the next former Mrs. Hicks.

Just when I started enjoying some relief from living on the sun’s surface, guilt pulled aside the shower curtain and metaphorically stabbed me with the fact that I’m wasting water.

It’s just too much. The sacrifice needs to be shared. Fast.

I would’ve gone to one of the many public spaces turned into “cooling centers” last week, where heat refugees huddled against the sun attacking us with radiation, like British civilians huddled in bomb shelters during the Blitz.

But what if some of the sweaty huddlers has some leftover Covid?

I hate crotchety old people moaning about the old days being better. But, unless we all get to work building a more sensible world, maybe they’re finally right.

Follow music critic Tony Hicks at Twitter.com/TonyBaloney1967.