A conversation

Subtitle: let's not kid ourselves.

What you say (what you mean)

A: Hi (hi.)
B: Hi! (hi.)
A: How have you been? (haven't seen you in a long time and have no idea what's happened to your life.)
B: Pretty well, thanks. Yourself? (well, my boyfriend/gilfriend just left me and I need to find a new place to live ASAP. I hope your life is worse than mine, so I'll feel better.)
A: Doing just fine. (except I'm broke and have had the flu for two weeks. But your lot sounds worse off, so there's that...)
B: Good to hear. Crappy weather we've got. (I can't think of anything to say.)
A: Yeah, no kidding. Hasn't rained like this in weeks. (I can't think of anything either.)
B: Supposed to get better tomorrow. (Ummmmm.....)
A: Yeah, we'll see. This rain sucks! (Ummmm......)
B: Well, I've got to run. We should catch up sometime... (This is getting awkward, so I'm bailing. Let's not have this conversation again any time soon.)
A: Definately. I've actually gotta run too, but I'll drop you a line sometime. (Yay, an exit. Don't wait for my call.)
B: Excellent! Yeah, well, take care! (Glad that's over with!)
A: You too! (Finally got that tosser off my back!)

Why is it that we default to talking about the weather when we've got nothing to say? I don't even buy the argument of weather as the lowest common denominator--why do I write about the weather to penpals or friends far away? It has no actual relevance to anything whatsoever, and why can't we just say what we're thinking?

Drizzly thoughts

The morning makes your day: a good morning, a good day, or so the theory goes. Starbucks is built on it, or at least the café at the university where the lines are so long you have to weigh your caffine habit against the probably dirty looks you receive for walking in late. Waking to the sound of rain on the roof and the windowpanes can be soothing, a peaceful feeling of Mother Nature drinking her fill, smoky clouds pushing into the mording which, yeilding unwilling, gives unto day. The air is cleaner, fresher and bears the sharp scent of ozone. If you're lucky, the light reflecting between grey sidewalks and laden clouds charges the air with a strange intensity.

The sodden muck resulting from a steady drizzle dampens the spirits as well, as if the cold water has been pouring into my enthusiasm instead of just my collar. Nothing, however, is more exciting than a torrential rain or a lightning storm--provided, of course, of the appropriate shelter. Listening to rain and wind buffet the house and howl at the corners like an injured animal.

People of this area have a strange relationship to lightning: fear. For us, weather plays a crucial and tempermental role in our lives, changing suddenly and maliciously, cloudless skies of an unfathomable blue giving way to furious storms rolling in from the west. It can snow in June and September, be sunny one minute and hailing another. Driving into the mountains once I experienced sunshine, wind, rain, hail, lightning, snow, and back to sunshine. In the space of half an hour.

We fear the lightning as we fear few other things. Like peoples of an earlier age cowering before God we too are judged but indiscriminately, like a petulant child, and cower before that infinite power. Lightning inspires terror and frantic counting, if you are fortunate that there exists enough of a gap between the flash and the crash to not make the exercise superfluous.

But today is not such a day, and better pens than mine have exercised their creative bent on the subject of weather and storms. Today is a day that inspires no torrential writing of high creative quality; thoughts, like the weather, are insipid at best, dogged by the thought that I haven't been properly dry since breakfast.

And on a relatively unrelated note: "Still waters run deep." What the hell does that mean?

It was a dark and stormy night...

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803 - 1873), Paul Clifford (1830)

My windows are shaking. If I turn off my music I can hear the wind howling, the pained wailing punctuated by banging doors, the spare trashcan skipping like a tumbleweed in the wind. More worrying is the distant strains of the doppler effect, the sound the sirens here make that are so different from American cop cars. The joy of living in the fourth floor in the corner appartment is that the wind seems to take extra joy in tugging on our house as it passes, the rows of houses funneling and concentrating the air into buffeting gusts. The building doesn’t shake, for which I am grateful, but the dull roar sounds sometimes like a waterfall.



The storm isn’t too bad here, compared with other parts of Germany. The entire long-distance rail network has been shut down, and there are probably plenty of poor souls stuck somewhere they don’t want to be, waiting for trains that won’t come. It’s like Waiting for Godot plus The Tempest, without the silly tights. Nine people have died so far, either from trees or doors, come uprooted or unhinged. It’s strange in such a storm; everyday objects, objects of utility or beauty become dangerous, menacing, posing the greatest risk to us is our very environment. It makes you jumpy, wind saws on the nerves like hyperactive kids when you have a headache. A dull thump echoing from a block away tells me something has broken loose.



I love a good storm. Taking shelter, nothing is more spectacular than a fantastic lightning storm, the kind best watched from the back deck looking out over Green Valley of a summer evening. Exposed, nothing is more dangerous than a bolt of lightning on a tree-lined ridge, nothing more terrifying than being abord a ship buffeted by winds on an open sea. It’s exhilirating and frightening, exposed before raw power and forces I cannot even begin to comprehend.



Global warming has gone from far left field to mainstream, to mix metaphors; it is a phenomenon either created or abetted by human folly and greed, making these storms, ice storms, snow storms, droughts, hurricanes, floods, and any other natural disasters you can dream of even more a part of our daily life and, hopefully, our consciousness and conscience. I don’t know if there is anything to be done to prevent the increasingly inevitable; undoing the mistakes of the past—particularly in light of the sheer magnitude of human presence, in numbers and in effect—may well be beyond our control, and avoiding the mistakes of the present and future—as elusive as even this prospect may be—may well not be enough. As a friend of mine once wrote in a song, as we sat on his couch listening to the wind howling: "You can't fight the weather, 'cause you will always lose..."

Socialism failed because it couldn't tell the economic truth; capitalism may fail because it couldn't tell the ecological truth.
Lester Brown, Fortune Brainstorm Conference, 2006

That is what scares me—as I sit and listen to the wind, enjoying the tingle down my spine—that my seldom glimpse of natural violence may well become my daily fare. Who needs terrorism when an unsecured door can kill you, when everything burns, when the wind and weather tear your house to pieces?