It’s odd. The things about summer I’m used to being annoyed at are mostly not applicable here in sunny Southern California. Virginia was a twisted alcoholic when it came to the weather; you never knew when she was going to come home and start slinging dishes at you, or just drop into bed and snooze off the drunken stupor. Summer days could be langorous or explosive, stupidly peaceful or downright punctuated with a battery of thunderstorms that would roll in over the Appalachians like a band of wild Injuns, attacking villages and towns and taking the women and children hostage. In a manner of speaking, of course.
It’s not that I mind thunderstorms. I love ‘em. They’re nature’s 2000 Flushes. But try scheduling afternoon hockey games at ten in the morning, when the sky is bright and blue, the sun is beaming its approval o’er the land, and birds indicate that it’s pretty near perfection, only to have the clouds descend in Valkyric vengeance upon your pitiful band of hockey revelers, and you’ll feel a pang of disappointment. Encounter this scenario multiple times throughout each week, stretch it throughout the entire summer, and you have yourself the beginnings of disapprobation, or if you’re in the South, umbrage.
Here, the weather is more like a rather mild mannered gentleman who enjoys chess games outside under the corner store porch awning, occasionally chiding the youngsters who race past on their scooters, snapping their bubblegum insolently at anything resembling authority. Sometimes the gentleman wears shorts with black socks, but you know that’s a fashion statement reserved for the indolent and fashion unrepentant, and you have to give props where they are due. It reminds you of your grandfather, or at least the TV idea of your grandfather, and it more or less indicates that the state of the world, at least your little corner of it, is tranquil and pacific.
It doesn’t hurt that you are fifteen minutes away from the Pacific, le grande bleu. That’s the kind of assurance you can fall asleep to at night.
So I found myself reflecting on the fact that in my life, I really don’t have much cause for complaint. That lack is refreshing on one hand, but I noticed that I sometimes feel a dubious sensation creeping up on me, as if I’ve landed on the moon without a helmet but I’m somehow still able to breathe. At some point I start thinking “This can’t last.” I hope it does, but you can only plan so far ahead, and in terms of attitudes, balmy quiescence in the workaday life has a way of making you easier prey. For what exactly I don’t know, but I do know that when I walk out of doors, I am a potential victim, made so, or at least eased into more, by the lack of any real daily dangers. No one in Paradise carries a gun, to paraphrase and rearrange Elvis Costello, and it means any old sinner can come in and change lives with a few well-aimed pulls of a finger.
Naturally, all this is metaphor designed for maximum obfuscation, since I’m not even sure I know exactly what I’m talking about. But no matter. It sounded right, and still sounds right in my head, though on paper feels a little more like a drawing of a wolf, rather than the actual wolf. Dangerous and scary, but only if you squint hard and turn your head sideways.
See, this is what not having anything to complain about does to you.
Check out the new 13 Months of Sunshine trailer. It’s been slightly re-edited with some clarifying footage, and the subtitles have been altered slightly, hopefully to better effect. Sorry for the non-posting yesterday. I sort of forgot. Then again, it was Monday. I never could get the hang of Mondays.
See you tomorrow.