Tag Archive: rain

Downpour

One of the primary downfalls of San Diego having the perfect weather that it has is the perfect weather that it has. Days and nights are beads on one unending rosary stringed by time where some beads differ from the others merely in the slight discoloration which pure chance engenders. San Diegan weather is a fine classical Swiss watch lovingly stashed away in a velvet case. I sometimes miss the inclement whims of the climate. I don’t remember ever seeing the Pacific under the infinite little beats of a downpour and I wonder what sorts of impressions it would make. The flat vast drum-head of the mighty ocean being played upon by the fallen children of the grim sky. Ocean’s white-maned horses whiter still behind the gray gauze of wet threads. The rolling hills of La Jolla disappearing into the distance and with them disappearing all those houses and all those people and perhaps in that obscurity, in one of those vanished houses, from behind a rain streaked window-pane, someone looking at the ocean and through its artificial truncated boundary, in my general direction and also wondering whether falling trees in unvisited forests make noises. Meanwhile the vibrating ocean under the relentless onslaught of the falling drops would sit uneasily in the bowl of the crescent coastline between La Jolla cove and Black’s beach. And since we are merely imagining, let’s imagine a black umbrella fluttering in the petrichored wind, its silvery ferrule cold to the touch and centered within its black dripping fabric, feet dangling over the stone embankment, wet hands gripping the wooden crook-handle, right over left, eyes half closed from the moist wind, trying to make out blunt figures in the smudged ocean.

Rain

I'm sitting here, near my window, and the heavy sky is throbbing above in deep grunting discolored voices, threatening the pane with ominous liquid possibilities. I quite like the word liquid. It's terse, handsome and upright. If I were to bestow upon it the vestiges of a human form, I would imagine it to be a man sharply dressed in a black tuxedo, reserved, graceful, and erudite, but one who has hidden beneath his charming facade a life, a disposition, a history quite sinister. Now I can hear the noise of rain outside. A river of sounds in which the individual drops have sacrificed their identities and produced after an eternity of fall a moment of both aural and visual poignancy - a perfect pear, tranquil and transparent, upon whose surface the Sun had poured the fruits of his deliberations, disintegrating into its formless constituent after touching the philistine contours of my window. I also notice that the vague impression of rain which I receive filtered through the window is probably more beautiful, more evocative than the actual rain itself - as if its essence, the rainness of rain, has been distilled through the clear glass and I receive not the knowledge of this particular instance of precipitation but a deeper more abstract experience which stands proxy to all those junctions of my life which were made slower and more beautiful by the cold, wet, and cozy presence of rain. The weather is brisk, the air quietened by the steady beat of falling drops - a low constant note, a canvas which has been uniformly painted in a dark hue, the background taste of salt, the default response to the questions of a questionnaire - an abstraction which is chipping away reality at its edges and inducing in me the fantastic images which are the harbinger of deep sleep.

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