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The End of a Heat Wave

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Today, for the first time in more than two months, the temperature in Southern California is close to normal, with cooler days to come. Of course, it will still be humid; but that is because the Pacific Ocean between Mexico and Hawaii is churning out typhoons and cyclones as if they were sausages. Even though these are a thousand miles (1,609 kilometers) southwest of us, the winds carry much of the moisture our way.

What this means is I will be able to go places without sweating and stinking excessively. Combined with my broken collarbone at the beginning of June, the hot weather has kept me close to the ocean most of the time. In three months, I have been able to go to the central library downtown only three times—and it took a lot out of me to do so.

Martine and I will celebrate by attending the Long Beach Greek Festival this coming weekend.

On Heat and Laziness

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When It Gets Hot, I Turn Lethargic

The massive heat wave that is the Summer of 2026 has made me extremely lazy. I still do a lot of reading, but I don’t travel much, even locally. If I head toward any of the valleys, I find nothing but hot sun and triple-digit temperatures.

Even my Thursday trips downtown are affected. For next Thursday, the predicted high downtown is 93° Fahrenheit (34° Celsius). In that case, I would be tempted to stay near the coast, where I live. Even that could be hot enough for me considering the constant humidity of 60% or more.

Climate change is turning me into a sort of homebody. I still do a lot of reading. (Current book: Paul Theroux’s The Mosquito Coast.) The temptation is to turn this blog site into an extension of my Goodreads site, except with pictures. That I don’t want to do: I like my posts to show more variety.

That high-pressure area that has encamped over the Arizona desert is bound to break up at some point. And there is a limit to how many Pacific storms could send constant humidity our way.

I live in an 80-year-old apartment building that was constructed without insulation. And we don’t have air conditioning. So it doesn’t take too intensive a heat wave to turn it into a sweat box. What with our recent meteorological history, I’m not a big fan of summer.

La Biblioteca

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Los Angeles Metro Rail E-Line Train

It is Tuesday, but I’m already looking forward to my regular Thursday trip downtown.While I was laid up with my broken collarbone, I missed my weekly Mindful Meditation session at the Central Library. And I missed picking out books to take home and read. Finally, I enjoyed eating lunch at one of L.A.’s ethnic restaurants near the Central Library and taking the train back to my MetroRail stop.

Of course, I was never at a loss for books to read while I was healing at home. I have a couple thousand books on my Amazon Kindle as well as some 5,000 titles on my shelves. I like to joke that I made a deal with the Deity (or was it the Devil?) to remain alive until all my books were read. Right now, I am reading James Ellroy’s Widespread Panic and enjoying its look at the 1950s and 1960s in Southern California, with special emphasis on the naughty goings-on with Hollywood legends and Commies.

Fortunately, the mercury will probably not zoom past 90° Fahrenheit (32° Celsius) this Thursday, for the first time since I returned to my downtown Thursday trips. In the past few weeks, Thursday was the hottest day of the week in downtown L.A.’s Financial District.

After I post this blog entry, I will use Google to locate some new restaurants. I’m not looking for anything fancy, just something cheap enough to accommodate the legions of white collar workers who have offices in the area.

“This Is the End”

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Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now (1979)

As the monster heat wave continues, I keep thinking of the opening scene to Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. In it, Martin Sheen is lying on his back in a Saigon guesthouse room, sweating as he hear the sound of a loud fan. And we hear the lyrics of The Doors singing “The End”:

This is the end
Beautiful friend
This is the end
My only friend, the end

Well, it’s not quite THAT bad, but the continuing heat and humidity is something I have not experienced in the sixty years I have lived in Southern California. The heat has never been THIS relentless, with no cooler days to break up that monster high pressure cell that has been perching on the American Southwest like a vulture from hell.

It seems as if the climate news from around the world is all bad. High winds. Flood. Drought. Wildfires. Earthquakes.

There’s precious little we can do about the weather. I say: Make like a lizard. Wait and see what happens. Change is coming, but what the nature of that change is, no one knows.

A Month of Heat and Humidity

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For the entire month of July, Southern California has been enduring not only a heat wave, but a humid heat wave. Granted that the temperature farther inland has been much worse than what I have had to endure living a scant two miles from the beach as I do. When it’s 80° Fahrenheit here (27° Celsius), it’s well over 100° Fahrenheit (38° Celsius) in the valleys and deserts.

My brother Dan lives in the Coachella Valley, where the mercury has topped 117° Fahrenheit (47° Celsius) at times. No wonder that he is considering a move to Northern California.

In the sixty years I have lived in Southern California, I have never experienced anything like this. It is quite evident that the entire world is in the grip of some strange weather conditions. The fires in France and Spain are like nothing I have ever seen in Europe. And the constant humidity from tropical storms wending westward from Mexico have sent waves of humid air circulating over the Southwest.

Every day, the weather forecast is virtually the same, even looking forward for the next seven days.

I don’t know where all this is heading over the next ten or twenty years. Certainly no place good. We seem to have left the Little Ice Age that began in the 14th century in the rearview mirror. Maybe the earth has decided to give us up as a bad lot and condemned the human race to become crispy critters. No doubt we had it coming to us.

DTLA in the Heat

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Los Angeles in the Year’s First Major Heat Wave

Today, for the first time in six weeks, I took the MetroRail E Train downtown to attend the Mindful Meditation session at the Central Library. The reason for my absence? In early June, I broke my collarbone; and it is only now that I feel well enough to attend.

And the weather for my first day back was a lulu. It was 90º Fahrenheit (32º Celsius), with the humidity making it feel even more sweltering. As I have no pituitary gland to control my adrenaline, I took extra hydrocortisone at breakfast and lunch and drank plenty of liquids, including a bill bowl of Vietnamese phó with filet mignon and noodles for lunch.

Usually, I check out three or four books from the library. Today, I didn’t check any books out, not wanting to carry a book bag with my recuperating right arm Instead, I looked at several travel guides to Cambodia and Laos before the guided meditation session began. (I’ve been reading a lot about neighboring Thailand lately.)

After I ate at the 505 Spring Street food court (in air-conditioned comfort), I trudged the three blocks south to the 7th Street Metro Center station at 7th and Flower Streets. As the elevator was out of service (again), I laboriously took the stairs down to the tracks and waited two minutes for the train to Santa Monica.

All in all, it was a positive experience. This first time back, I wanted to err on the side of caution; and I’m glad I did.

Is This Spring, Really?

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Commemorating the First Day of Spring

Spring in Southern California is not as distinctive a season as it is back east, where it is associated with an end to snow and slush. All this week, the temperature has been near 100° Fahrenheit (37° Celsius), even near the beach. Further inland, heat records were broken with dismaying regularity.

The one distinctive spring weather pattern is associated with the terms “Marine Layer” and ”June Gloom.” The wind comes from the ocean and blows clouds inland. Tourists visiting Southern California in the spring always say that they always heard the sun is always shining here. In fact it is, but between the sun and the ground there are clouds and the weather tends to be cool.

I say “tends” because over the past few years, the pattern has been changing. There have been tropical heat waves in the winter, rain falling earlier and later than usual, and even an occasional cold snap. I have no idea where the weather is tending, whether California will become even more desert-like, or whether the rainy season will result in a wetter climate.

It’s always quite beautiful when we’ve had a good rainy season. The California Poppy Preserve in the Antelope Valley becomes full of wildfires. Even the Mohave Desert can appear to be carpeted with tiny, but utterly lovely wildflowers.

But then, all these climactic weather megatrends will not be clear until long after I am gone. All I know is that the weather is very different from when I first moved here in 1966. Will the San Andreas or Cascadia fault result in massive earthquakes? Will the Central Valley be flooded? Or will water become increasingly scarce and make the big cities of California unlivable? (My bet is on the latter.)

Letting It All Hang Out

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Sea Lions at Marina Del Rey’s Chace Park

Today at Marina Del Rey’s Chace Park I was able to escape the heat for a couple of hours. The weatherman said that there would be the beginnings of an onshore flow (sea breeze), and he was right. It was utterly delightful, except that the coolness attracted a lot of young men who were loudly attesting to their street cred, making it difficult for me to read.

That’s all right, I walked to a bench in the shade at Stone Point, where the cool breeze that has not been present all week during the current heat wave cooled my head. Funny thing, as I returned to my parked car, I felt the wind die down and the temperature rise every hundred feet (30 meters). By the time I sat in my car, I felt I was in a sauna.

When the weather is unrelievedly hot, the thing to do is make like a lizard. But, since we are at the edge of the sea, make like a sea lion. I watched the sea lions for a few minutes, trying to determine whether they were in fact harbor seals. As soon as I heard one of them make the characteristic barking sound, I knew that they were in fact sea lions. The other identification is to check whether they have visible ears, but I wasn’t close enough to be 100% certain.

In any case, these sea lions were doing the right thing on a hot day.

Autumn Heat

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Martine at Chace Park in the Marina

Predictably, we are in the middle of an autumn heat wave. No, I did not go to Chace Park today. This time of year, the wind blows hot air from the desert; so there is little to be gained waiting for sea breezes that are not likely to cool my brow.

Martine went downtown by herself to partake of the high-toned atmosphere around Union Station and the Civic Center. (Am I being ironic? To be sure I am being ironic.)

Tomorrow I may go downtown, though I may bail if the temp gets too high, like 95° degrees Fahrenheit (35° Celsius) or above. That walk from the Metro Rail 7th Street Station to the Central Library would be prohibitively hot. I will check the temp tomorrow morning before making my decision.

I have become very dependent on the weekly Mindful Meditation sessions at the Central Library. Then, too, there are those seven floors of books that draw me in.

August Is for Lizards

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We’ve had it pretty easy up until now. We all knew that the heat would suddenly descend on us along the Southern California coast, just as it has for weeks in the East, South, and Midwest.

Even now, it is nowhere near as hot and sticky here as it is inland or in the San Fernando and San Gabriel Valleys. (And we won’t even mention the Coachella Valley.)

Living as we do in an apartment building without any insulation, let alone air conditioning, it can get hot after a few days of heat radiating toward our walls and roof—and it can stay hot. Martine and I have fans going all over the place. It helps, particularly after the sun goes down; but dropping off to sleep is not easy.

I was going to cook a minted rice casserole for supper. As dinner time approached, however, I gave up on the idea. What? Turn on the oven on a day like this? No way José!

Instead I had some blue cheese with Ritz crackers, a glass of unsweetened ice tea, and a white peach.

Based on past experience, I knew the heat wave would last for days, perhaps even weeks, longer than the weather forecasters said it would. Time to live like a lizard!