Covid, oddly distant killer cops, evil heat, record fires, the decline of coral reefs and, well, every damn thing. The election year is a comic book by R. Crumb on bad acid. There seems to be a mask vs. non-mask divide and no vaccine in sight, certainly no pill for viscerally stupid. In August, the stats for Covid 19 are so far off the charts in Kansas and Missouri that someone must be importing the stuff and sprinkling it in the water. 

I look out the window and see marvelous clouds like those N.C. Wyeth painted, bigass cumulus, and the scene is one that brings to mind childhood and how we’d watch those clouds form things and re-form from, say, a crocodile face to a dog to a buxom lady in a hat. No evidence of the evil. No sign that says Here Be Dragons.

 That was the way it appeared in L.A. looking out of my office windows on the seventh floor during an earthquake. Birds flying. Cumulus clouds. Bright blue sky behind them. And I was standing watching drawers slide open, chrome sprinkler fixtures fall out of the ceiling and bounce on the carpet. The building was yawing. But outside, all seemed normal. The birds didn’t care. The light traffic was moving. And I was feeling...off, as though the compass needle in my balance system was fluttering.

 Out there they had what they called earthquake weather; the Santa Ana winds had the same effect. More freeway shootings occurred. Animals were crazy acting. I saw a pet rabbit kick its cat friend halfway across a yard, then throw itself against the chain link fence to try to get away before an earthquake.

 Here’s an amalgamation of Didion and Raymond Chandler that sums it up:

 “The Pacific turned ominously glossy during a Santa Ana period, and one woke in the night troubled not only by the peacocks screaming in the olive trees but by the eerie absence of surf. The heat was surreal. The sky had a yellow cast, the kind of light sometimes called "earthquake weather."

"My only neighbor would not come out of her house for days, and there were no lights at night, and her husband roamed the place with a machete. One day he would tell me that he had heard a trespasser, the next a rattlesnake.

 "On nights like that..." Raymond Chandler once wrote about the Santa Ana, "...every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen." That was the kind of wind it was. Whenever and wherever (it) blows, doctors hear about headaches and nausea and allergies, about "nervousness," about "depression." In Los Angeles some teachers do not attempt to conduct formal classes during a Santa Ana, because the children become unmanageable.”

I came home where it’s “safe” and a couple of years later a tornado blew our barn roof off. Before it happened, I felt something like I’d felt before Santa Anas. So did the horses. They bunched nervously in the loafing shed and kicked at the north wall.

 Didion wrote, “A few years ago an Israeli physicist discovered that not only during such winds, but for the ten or twelve hours which precede them, the air carries an unusually high ratio of positive to negative ions. No one seems to know exactly why that should be; some talk about friction and others suggest solar disturbances. In any case the positive ions are there, and what an excess of positive ions does, in the simplest terms, is make people unhappy. One cannot get much more mechanistic than that”

 I don’t feel that way today, just pissed because the weather people said it would be less humid today and it’s still heavy “air you can wear” as the KSHB weather lady put it. I despise humidity. And I still have to wade through it for my daily Fitbit quota. What brought all this on was “Season of the Witch” on my iPod. Bloomfield, Kooper and Stills. “Season of the Witch” is weird, like the times. Perfect accompaniment for how I feel.

 I recommend the album, mainly for its “His Holy Modal Majesty,” a nine minute display of musical pyrotechnics that never fails to whirl me into another place than this hellscape of peurile politics, bigotry and typhoid Marys leaping out to spray you with whatever they’re carrying.

 To better times. G