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Life After Summer

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When I was a child, I looked forward to summer. School was out and I could play. Times have changed: With global warming, we look forward to ever hotter summers—where the heat is more menacing and longer-lasting. Today I found out there is even the prospect of rain within a few days, as Tropical Storm Rachel wheels to the right over Baja California and presents us with the possibility of several days of showers.

I feel someone stupid writing so much about the weather, But then, never before has the weather affected me in this way. I sit here shirtless to avoid sweating with a ceiling fan above me to dry me off.

When my physical therapy sessions come to an end, I look forward to going more places, no longer avoiding some valley destinations as being too fiercely hot. Even my favorite hot-weather refuge, Chace Park in Marina Del Rey, has been too uncomfortable because of a Santa Ana wind backing the desert heat westward over the Pacific shore.

A Grim Future?

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Wild Surf Destroying Beachside Homes in Dana Point

Southern California has had a rough time of it over the last two years. First there were the two January 2025 fires that destroyed two Los Angeles neighborhoods: Pacific Palisades and Altadena. Now, over the last several weeks, there was the El Niño from hell that led to the beaches from Los Angeles to San Diego counties being all but destroyed by high tides caused by a seemingly endless series of Central Pacific tropical storms.

A corollary is the superhot summer of 2026 that refuses to quit. Today the beach was hotter than the Coachella Valley. Technically, this is autumn; but it doesn’t look like it. The only thing that’s different is that the humidity is way down.

What¹s next? A killer earthquake along the San Andreas fault? The complete desertification of the California coast so that it resembles the Atacama in Chile? More wildfires? Monster flooding? Killer heat waves that make L.A. resemble a 350° oven (177° Celsius)? Will AI lead to massacres of innocent humans? Are there, in fact, any innocent humans?

Another summer like this one would make me think seriously of moving to Nome, Alaska, or Ushuaia, Argentina (which lies a mere 600 miles, or 966 kilometers, from Antarctica.

But then one tends to look mat the future by straight-lining the disasters of the past. Nature doesn’t work that way. With all our science, we have no idea what will happen next, and when, and how disastrous. Any forecasting based on this year’s events is (hopefully) jejune.

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.