Weather

Southern Californians do not, as a rule, think about the weather. At all. (Unless it rains. Then we go completely and utterly apes*** like it's the first time that this has happened in the history of creation and engage in a state of mild panic that mostly manifests itself in the complete inability to operate a motor vehicle. Seriously, the characters in Magnolia dealt with the climactic hail of frogs with more aplomb that the average Los Angeleno does with a light shower.) True, we have our mountains and their snow--but since most of us visit those areas only briefly and voluntarily to ski, that weather is merely another special effect, no doubt created by the same imagineers who gave us the wonderful world of Disney.

Here, people think about the weather. Or rather, they don't--but they don't in a very different way. Like zoo-keepers who've worked around wild animals for years, they're aware of the threat, but they treat it with well-schooled nonchalance. I...have not yet delivered that skill. Example: the alarm went off this morning, and the airhead DJs were babbling their usual nonsense about what they'd watched on TV the night before. I squeezed my eyes more tightly closed and tried to will myself into another dimension of reality--one in which I had another two hours to sleep--someday I swear I will hit those untapped psychic powers to bend time and space, and then look out, all of you! Said breakthrough did not occur this morning, though, and I simply huddled in more deeply, semi-fetal, refusing to react to anything that consciousness had to offer.

Then one of the DJs breezily announced the current weather conditions. She said, and this constituted the entirety of her statement on the climate: "It's 28 right now."

My eyes snapped open. Wait, I thought. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. 28? TWENTY-EIGHT?!?! You do NOT just announce that it's TWENTY EIGHT DEGREES and then move on like it's nothing! TWENTY EIGHT DEGREES IS THE END OF THE WORLD!!! TWENTY EIGHT DEGREES IS ACCOMPANIED BY THE HOOFBEATS OF THE FOUR HORSEMEN!!! TWENTY EIGHT DEGREES...is nothing. Nothing at all. Much of the world lives in places where 28 degrees is just What Happens, and you get up and deal with it and move on. 28 Degrees is just...Life, and no big deal about it.

The calmness of the Midwest is clearly predicated on the fact that they realize that extremity occurs, but if you meet it with your own extremity--like, say, panicking over a cold snap--it just won't end well. So you roll with it. You deal. The End.

Needless to say, I retreated from the sanity of this lesson as best I could. But then those a**holes started playing "Bad To The Bone" and I hate that f***ing song, so I got out of bed to shut off the radio, and started my day. And dealt.

First Step Off The Train

Actually, that was about 3 months ago, but it makes for a good opening, and really, that's still how I feel--that 'can still smell the diesel from the train station' feeling. Although since I'm only a few miles from a fairly busy set of tracks, maybe that's not so much an allegory as a literalism. But anyway--

A time of upheaval has seemed, for the moment, to have landed me in a place in which to take root. Shunted out of the Ph.D. mint, drop-kicked out of a marriage, and shuttle-cocked cross-country from the Southern California that's been my home for the past...few...OK, my whole life. And now, blinking through the glare of culture shock and a time change I still can't quite wrap my head around ("What do you mean, Prime Time starts at 7:00?! That's...deranged!"), I'm starting to get my bearings.

The dream job for me has always been the English Professorship At The Small Liberal Arts College In New England. I came close. I got all but the geography and the culture that goes with it. Instead of New England's Sober, Presbyterian Stoicism, I'm surrounded by Midwestern Genial, Lutheran Pragmatism. And I'm not sure but that I didn't wind up in the better of the two.

To be sure, I'm still a little confused at the ubiquitous Niceness that pervades the place at distressingly high levels--I haven't been flipped off once since I've been here, and surely that can't be normal? But perhaps it can--perhaps I am, as it were, emerging from a childhood in the asylum into the world of the square-shouldered and level-headed, and gazing in wonder at the un-self-indulgent functionality of it all. I keep waiting for a Lynchian underbelly to reveal itself--still checking my lawn for that severed ear--but so far, the Norman Rockwellian essence to the place appears undiluted by hidden horrors.

But I'm a patient and cynical fellow. Either I'll change this place, or it will change me. More about job, life, and general observations to follow...