Downpour

One of the primary downfalls of San Diego having the perfect weather that it has is the perfect weather that it has. Days and nights are beads on one unending rosary stringed by time where some beads differ from the others merely in the slight discoloration which pure chance engenders. San Diegan weather is a fine classical Swiss watch lovingly stashed away in a velvet case. I sometimes miss the inclement whims of the climate. I don’t remember ever seeing the Pacific under the infinite little beats of a downpour and I wonder what sorts of impressions it would make. The flat vast drum-head of the mighty ocean being played upon by the fallen children of the grim sky. Ocean’s white-maned horses whiter still behind the gray gauze of wet threads. The rolling hills of La Jolla disappearing into the distance and with them disappearing all those houses and all those people and perhaps in that obscurity, in one of those vanished houses, from behind a rain streaked window-pane, someone looking at the ocean and through its artificial truncated boundary, in my general direction and also wondering whether falling trees in unvisited forests make noises. Meanwhile the vibrating ocean under the relentless onslaught of the falling drops would sit uneasily in the bowl of the crescent coastline between La Jolla cove and Black’s beach. And since we are merely imagining, let’s imagine a black umbrella fluttering in the petrichored wind, its silvery ferrule cold to the touch and centered within its black dripping fabric, feet dangling over the stone embankment, wet hands gripping the wooden crook-handle, right over left, eyes half closed from the moist wind, trying to make out blunt figures in the smudged ocean.