The Hotness

A lot of people live in Southern California. A certain portion of the population is convinced that it's because we share part of our porous border attached to the parasitic narco-state of Mexico, pumping the poisonous infection of brown-skinned illegal immigrants into our midst in their uncountable multitudes, like some kind of bulimic inverse leech. Of course way more border is shared with New Mexico, which should even seem more homey because it's got Mexico right in the name, but yet somehow they have something less than 54 electoral votes and very manageable traffic. And this after all that positive Breaking Bad exposure, sure to draw new faces looking for elaborate murder plots and designer crank.

No beaches, though. That's probably it.

Well, that and the fact that we have what I like to think of as elective weather. It's cooler at the beach. There's snow in the mountains if you want that. On the flatlands in between, there's some variation depending on which valley you're trapped in, but none of them are particularly hard to acclimatize to, very literally speaking. What is it usually? It's nice. There's no editorial subjectivity in that word either, it's just sunny and maybe the occasional cloud, sometimes cooled off by some fog in the morning depending on which direction the very agreeable wind is blowing that day. It's nice weather. It's considerate and unobtrusive. It lets you cut in line and always insists on picking up the check.

Humans, sadly, are creatures of rhythm.* I believe it's part of our evolutionary adaptability, an ability (like all good Darwinian abilities) that is advantageous to the prospect of species survival. We are certainly able to get used to things. Sometimes to our own horrible detriment, but that's just better evidence of how it's hard-wired into us. Know anyone in an absolutely horrible, even abusive relationship with a thief or a cheater or a mail-in CD of the month club that they seem utterly incapable of escaping from? That's because they've adapted to their circumstance. The beasts of the world find their niche by the simple act of not having been killed off by disease, predators or weather in one place in the world when all their brethren are wiped out everywhere else.

As people, cursed with the Freudian self-aware ego and super-ego instead of just that handy, lizard id, we are able to make the same sort of jump all internally, on an individual level. We can make the active decision: if I do X and Y, then I can survive here. This is why I don't believe in the concept of hell. Even waist-deep in a lake of eternal fire, someone in there is so relieved just to know what to expect for all of the remainder of eternity.

As long as the backbeat is steady, humans will take a rhythm over almost any kind of change. The flipside of that, of course, is that the alteration of the same rhythm, especially unexpectedly, is a constant source of anxiety and/or even emotional trauma. This is probably a sprinkled-in lesser version of the anxiety tied to what is always the ultimately un-prepare-able ur-change that is unavoidable death, for either you or people you love.** It still beats at us, nicks us bloody, pulls at the frayed edges of what is a constantly unraveling and re-weaving tapestry that is the mere semblance of sanity, forcing us to clutch at the tragically noncorporeal wisps of moments in time to hold them still in an attempt to stave off the black avalanche of nothing armed only with threads of elusive color that remain stubbornly out of our cold, limited, perishable reach.

All of this is by way of me apologizing for what I'm about to do, which is complain about the weather in SoCal right now. It's too warm. I know, everyone else is dying from freezer-ation or whatever you call extra bad coldness. I'm not good with the words, sorry, the concepts are just so foreign. Our winters are lame, sure, but come on: they're forecasting 90 degrees next Tuesday. That's ninety above zero. This is not January in Southern California. We usually do somewhere between 50 and 70 from Thanksgiving until about President's Day, with three or four decent storm systems in there giving us ALL the rain we get ALL year.

I know. I get it. It's bad form to complain about being too comfortable. But it's not what I'm used to. And there's no end in sight to this pattern that's been in place since before Christmas. I'm trying to process the change, but the inherent panic involved in any kind of similar adjustment just makes me spin out into imagined scenarios of unseasonable wildfire and weather-induced earthquakes.

Something different? It can only mean the end of the world. It's exactly the same way I felt when they cancelled Firefly.



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*Some more than others. Gloria Estefan vs. Queen Elizabeth II, for example.

**Or at least have gotten used to seeing around, even if they are assholes. Like Gloria Estefan or Queen Elizabeth II.