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“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.

Miami on the Pacific

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If It Gets Any More Humid …

Thanks, Mario! The Mexican storm of this name has, upon dissipating flooded California with moist, tropical air and the threat of thunderstorms. As I went downtown today for my weekly Mindful Meditation session at the L.A. Central Library, I suddenly felt many of my joints protesting—from my formerly broken shoulders (both of them) to my left hip (replaced a quarter of a century ago).

Somehow, I made it, even though the elevator down to the Metro Rail station at Seventh Street was closed for repairs. Back when it was built, the architects decided they didn’t need a down escalator: Stairs should do nicely. Hah!

The humidity will probably last through the weekend, regardless what the weather forecaster say. What do they know?

A Hint of Fall

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Could Summer Really Be Over?

Our seasons in Los Angeles are very different than in other parts of the country. For the last few days, we’ve had a touch of autumn; but that doesn’t mean that there will be any consistency in the weather over the next six weeks or so. We might very well be in for a spell of hot, dry, windy weather—otherwise known as the Santa Ana winds. Or we could actually get some measurable (i.e., more than 1 centimeter) precipitation, though that is unlikely. It will probably get cooler in the evenings, or not.

One thing for sure: My left knee is aching, and I struggle slightly to rise from a sitting position. I’ve just taken some aspirin, which will probably help some. And I will probably get my flu shot sometime this week, because the flu season sets in fast whenever the weather gets cooler.

Although this has not been a particularly hot summer, it has been a humid one. Our humidity usually lasts only through July, but this year it has been virtually non-stop. We even got some slight drizzle yesterday and Friday. It would be nice if we had another wet winter, though the scientists who predict this sort of thing say that California will continue to have terrible droughts. This translates into terrible wildfires. Sigh!