Tag: Weather

Fallin’ for fall

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

When I shop for clothes, I wait till summer. That’s when the fall lines drop, filling catalogs with browns and blacks and blues and grays — my kind of shades.

Already I’ve bought a brown corduroy collar shirt and three sweatshirts of various styles, two in black and one in “midnight,” a charcoal-blue that exudes a singular mystery. Of course it will be two months before I can wear any of it. Still, fall rules. Off with t-shirts, shorts and the stumpy, undignified socks that go with them. And, as the heavens part and angels sing: no flip-flops, or what I call satan’s hooves.

What I really want now in this autumn urge is the pair of black and olive Todd Snyder sneakers I keep eyeballing online. But they are scandalously overpriced and it’s breaking my heart. (Hello, GoFundMe.) I also need a mid-weight coat, since my few jackets hit their expiration dates when “Gilmore Girls” aired on The WB.  

The coat is crucial. I go to London for a week in early November and I basically refuse to wear my nearly moth-eaten Barbour quilted jacket, despite its lingering suavity. It’s old and boring, having completed tours of duty around the world, fighting for my right to party. It’s time for an honorable discharge.

Rain. London can be lousy with it, though November temperatures hover in the 50s, which is my barometrical bag. So I need a coat that’s mid-weight and fairly water-resistant. 

Where I’m at right now it’s 82 degrees and pouring rain — the midsummer soak. It sort of reminds me of the jacket I need. Chances are another Barbour, the classic British brand with James Bondian connotations (see: “Skyfall”). This is especially true since I’ll be in London, the obvious spot to look for a new Barbour, which should be plentiful and cheaper.

Unless we’re talking books, I am no shopaholic. Malls and shopping districts zombify me. I am definitely no clothes horse — more like a clothes donkey, procuring a couple pieces a year and perhaps a pair of sneakers. I read no fashion magazines. I can’t tell Dior from Gucci and don’t care. I peruse three or four online catalogs with more of a glancing interest, pshaw, than sweaty-palmed voracity. 

When I buy something, I try to make it count. Too often, though, I get a shirt, say, and months later it’s in the Salvation Army or Veteran’s pile, worn once or twice with gathering disappointment. And so savvy curation is paramount. Those Todd Snyder sneakers noted above? I have a creeping sensation they wouldn’t work out even if I could justify their pornographic price tag and see for myself. 

Clothes, like most purchases, are a gamble. (Look at the snaking returns line for Amazon products at Whole Foods — capitalistic carnage.) I fiendishly acquire books and, frankly, half are duds or don’t meet the hype. (That’s me, third in line at Whole Foods.)

Coupling is hard. Ask any character in any rom-com, dimples be damned. I think I’m having a tumultuous relationship with the thick, long-sleeve polo shirt I bought last year that’s this close to winding up in the Goodwill racks. We’ve lost that lovin’ feeling. It’s a nice fall shirt that cost a pretty penny, and it’s going cheap. 

Anyone?

In the throes of snow

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

It came down hard, in a swirling nocturnal swoop, the white stuff, upholstering everything in its voracious colditude. So pretty! Yes, adorable. The abominable snow mess. Ain’t it cute?

So it’s bad, 12 inches bad, but it’s actually rather doable. This isn’t Quebec or the South, so we deal. Yet a pain it remains, digging out cars, shoveling walkways, taking care not to slip on your derriere and, perhaps most perilous, wearing caps with fuzzy balls on top.

It’s cold. Often when it snows the temperature stays reasonable, but it’s downright frigid and the combo compounds the icy aura. Is this what Moscow is like? Walking Cubby the dog is a polar expedition and the poor pup has to sport a Christmas-themed sweater that he finds humiliating. I find it humiliating. Anyway, my snow boots are killing me. I need a dog sled.

The kids dig the downy manna. Even now, in the darkness of 8 p.m., they’re sledding down the longer, steeper driveways, laughing and hooting. “Cooper, you get in the front this time!” a boy hollers, setting up his friend for a suicide mission.

The city plows the streets as fast as possible — i.e. a crawl — and neighbors shovel and snow-blow their sidewalks, so getting around is a little less precarious. Still, it’s a slalom course, weaving and leaping around the ice, metastasizing puddles and soufflés of snow. It’s ground-level climatic chaos. (And for all this, I still abhor summer.) Car tires crunch and slush, rolling through the slurry.

It will take days, weeks, for the mounds to melt. Someone built a sweet miniature snowman in the front yard, maybe eight inches tall. The dog dutifully urinated on it and it partially caved in. Is that what we need to rid all of this stuff? Cubby, your work is cut out for you.

One town away from me. (Photo: NYT)

Block party, year 48

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

It’s 6:45 p.m. and they’re still slinging burgers and hot dogs during what is officially the neighborhood’s 48th annual block party on a cool pre-fall eve. 

Forty-eighth — how is that even possible? There’s no one alive who’s that old. That means the block parties started in, like, 6 B.C. 

My math is fuzzy. What do I know. I just know the food spread bestowed by the locals is stupendous: Asian noodles, chicken empanadas, homemade guac, spicy pulled pork, eggplant parmesan and, inevitably, simple bags of neon-colored Doritos (party size!), and so much more. (Wait, no deviled eggs?) It’s a smorgasbord and you’ll never see me type that word again.

I don’t know one person at this asphalt shindig. I’m barely — barely — acquainted with my next-door neighbors and the people across the street. And the next-door neighbors didn’t even show at the block bash.

I met one of the guys across the street at the keg, which was lamentably undernourished, and we shook hands, made introductions and proceeded to flaccid small talk before I split. He’s lived across the way for at least four years. We’ve never exchanged a wave. Now we’re chatting over Budweiser in red Solo cups. 

And now I’m gone. Pulled pork beckons.

These block parties are never huge; only three blocks are invited. But they gather a decent melange of folks, a hundred or more. It’s a good blend — florid artsy types to troglodyte Trumpsters — that could use a healthy dose of diversity. Alas, this isn’t Berkeley.

Children. Why does everyone have two or three clinging, clamoring rug rats, pesky tweens or teens, boisterous broods of brats? It’s a nightmare. While the tots whine and cry, the tweens peacock on electric scooters, slaloming perilously around standing diners with an aren’t-I-cute smirk, hair billowing. I need a large hockey stick.

Dogs. Dogs are good. And there are at least six or seven, all leashless, roaming about, panting, grubbing for cheeseburgers and wieners. Cubby the magic mutt joins the canine convention, but his indifference towards other dogs is like Marvel fans to real movies. He does a quick sniff then mutters, “Get me the hell out of here of here. I’m bored. I smell Doritos.”

By now I’m pickled in boredom, too. I hit the keg for a second time and of course it’s dry. A guy is pumping it like mad, desperate for a last drop. His reward is a fizzle of foam. We look at each other and loudly commiserate.

I may have just made a friend.

Playing with dolls, and fire

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

On hot days like this, of relentless and arrogant sunshine, when breezes are miserly and shade revels in its scarcity, I like to hole up and construct voodoo dolls of ole Mother Nature, pins at the ready. Even more, I like to do the same of climate deniers, using power drills instead of pins. Their heads are much thicker.

It’s a grim business, but so is the ever-changing weather, the cataclysmic climes of now. We’re all just one flood or wildfire from unthinkable calamity. To those who actually believe it’s an elaborate liberal hoax — for fucksake — I hope disaster strikes them first, because it will ineluctably strike, and soon. (Retribution?)

The heat is feral today, following a streak of enveloping fall-like weather occasioned by a mean Hurricane Erin pinwheeling up the Atlantic Coast, another portent of global warming. From the Times: “As the planet warms, scientists say that rapidly intensifying hurricanes are becoming ever more likely.” And: “Hurricane season could ramp up with storms supercharged by warmer ocean waters fueled by human-caused climate change.”

Awesome.

This isn’t a sermon or a call to action. By now we should know of the horrors ahead. Yet many don’t, willfully and aggressively, and their ignorance, flat-out stupidity, permeates the highest offices in the land. Planet-saving regulations are being excised with the slash of a pen, and a diabolical grin.

The brevity of this post is purposeful. Preaching to the choir is redundant. And name-calling is for presidents. It’s a squib of personal reportage, this, describing my fabulous arts and crafts.

Notice how I’m making a fat, scowling, orange voodoo doll. Pins not required. I’ll just light it on fire and flush the ashes down the toilet. There’s your wildfire and hurricane in one fell swoop.

Dog 1, me zero

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A clank — the neighbor dispensing with wine bottles in the recycling bin. A thick rain falls and wind blusters the trees, making the dog’s ears perk up and eyes go wide. He bristles at the sound of heavy winds, and often pleads to get on my lap if it’s all too much out there. Rustling leaves — Cubby’s nemesis.

Now a jet plane roars above and the local commuter train blows a curt toot, last call for the suit and briefcase brigade. The rain gutters rattle with liquid bloat. For a couple of days, the water extinguishes the August heat. I couldn’t be happier. 

Summer’s almost gone, finished marring, charring the days with high 80s and 90s, sometimes more. Who likes this rot? Most people do, but, as my opinion abides, most people are maniacs. Melanoma. Enjoy.

I detest sweat as well, and shorts are the devil’s attire. But whoosh, the gusts flurry again and now the dog is on my lap, plop, an impossible tableau: dog jostling the laptop computer, making this task either funny or furious. Since it’s the dog, I’ll take the former. 

So now, typing one-handed, I’ll wrap this reverie of sight and sound, a mini-experiment in writing live, as the world unfurls, realizing once again that the damn dog always wins.  

Snow-wound

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

Snow. Finally.

If that sounds like relief, bliss, accommodation, you’re mistaken. I like snow, but I also dread it in myriad ways. I think you know what I mean. Snow is pretty, all those crystalline scenes and twinkling tableaus. It facilitates novel outdoor activities — skiing, sledding, snowball fights, snow angels, murderous avalanches. 

But it’s also drudgery: shoveling and scraping, slush and brown blech. I once, as a full-grown adult, slipped on my ass into a giant snow bluff. I was carrying groceries. And I’m still so goddam mad about it, I could punch a snowman.  

It’s the last day of February and the planet chooses now to fart out four piddling inches of icy powder in our East Coast parts. It arrives all coy and cutesy after a stubbornly snow-free winter that I will blame on dystopian climate change. Better theories? Fire away. 

You gotta walk in this crap. And drive in it. Both are treacherous outings. Somehow I lost my crummy winter boots — Frankenstein would’ve loved them — so taking the limping dog out for a walk in my sneakers felt like a high-wire act. I kept thinking: If I fall on my ass again, I’m cashing it all in. I’m just going to lie there and melt away with the snow.

But Cubby was digging it. He made so much yellow snow, it looked like neon graffiti sprayed across the endless white canvass. I think he wrote his name. (Another snowy pastime. Those were the days!) 

The snow fell overnight. You go to sleep with black streets, gray sidewalks, bare trees, visible cars. And you wake up stuffed inside a marshmallow. Branches bowed with white, cars buried, streets streaked by road-ripping plows. It’s a winter wonderland. For about half a day.

Then, unless more layers fall, it’s ice and mush and puddles and mud. So we got lucky, spared the drippy drama of multiple winter snows. Right now the stuff is melting fast. Tinkles of water from rooftops drop like rain. The sidewalks are clearing for safe strolling. 

People walk their dogs, wearing hats and muffs and gloves, sartorially overcompensating. It’s not that cold. But let them believe. Who knows when, or if, we’ll get blanketed in the white stuff again. Next month. Next year. Never.

This could so be me.

A brief winter reverie

~ Chris ~ 1 Comment

A crisp Sunday morning and gaggles of children hoot, holler and gambol outside. It is the sound of chaos. (And, to these gentle ears, terror.) 

Temperatures are far higher than the last couple of freezing days. At 47 degrees, the sky is a glowing gray, sun struggling to burn through the haze. A fine winter day.

The children are out at last, released from the arctic prison imposed by the polar vortex, or whatever hit us with only a whisper of snow, for which we’re grateful. Snow is lovely, until it’s a big brown Slurpee. 

It will hit 60 later this week, an unwelcome augur of springtime. I’m all about the 40s and 50s. I have plans to go to Florence, Italy, in one week and the forecast says low 50s and I couldn’t be happier. I can see you frowning, and I don’t care.

But spring is a’coming. I had a dream last night that colorful leaves — red! green! yellow! — were blossoming on naked winter branches. A dream? More of a nightmare. 

So save for the one-day dusting, there’s been no snow this season. The children above — those huggable hellions — have been deprived of sledding and hurling balls and making snowmen, however virtuosically deformed the creatures invariably turn out.

It’s been a mostly mellow winter, a zigzag of 20s to 60s, so heat lovers and outliers like me can split the difference. That rotund rodent Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow a few days ago, ergo we are promised — blessed with — six more weeks of winter, they say.

Hang tight. All this brisk glory will soon be usurped by sun and sweat and pollen and long days and children screeching outside and the warbling tune of the ice cream truck and picnics and baseball and tank tops and flip-flops and other fashion misdemeanors. It’s going to be a massacre. For now, I’ll do what I can: just chill with the chill.

Summer’s roar and pour

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

The sounds of summer: little girls shrieking in the park; the ice cream truck’s old-timey jingle-jangle; the living room fan’s sighing thrum; the glassy clank of the ice dispenser; the dog’s whistling nostrils as he naps to cool off.

Meanwhile, the sky is about to explode. 

Cool Whip clouds froth and darken, snuffing the sun with enveloping shadow. Then: thunder snaps and growls like splitting wood, and plump raindrops slap hard surfaces. 

It’s 90 degrees and, like that, it’s pouring and roaring. The sounds of summer. 

Only an hour ago I was walking in woolly humidity — the kind of goop that makes the small of your back immediately pool with sweat — under partly cloudy skies, typical summer climes on the East Coast. Which means, wear smart shoes and pack an umbrella.

No one cares that it kissed 100 degrees yesterday. Cloudbursts and thunderstorms are coming — have arrived — and while climate change is partly to blame, this is rather normal atmospheric behavior here and now.

I am so happy. Rain douses the heat, and temperatures can drop 20 degrees in less than an hour. Summer, foiled again! Lightning, so dazzling a sight, rakes bleak skies, and thunder makes Wagnerian drama.  

But they’re fickle, these wet, boisterous storms, with fitful, stop-start rhythms. Fooled into thinking one has passed, I jump at the chance to walk the dog.  

It’s hot as hell. The sun blazes — until it doesn’t. Shade suddenly blankets everything. Rumbles and cracks, those sounds of summer, augur trouble.

We get soaked. 

Summertime boos

~ Chris ~ 4 Comments

Summer’s here. Now scram.

People who know me, or who’ve read this blog, know that I am the whiniest, grumbliest, bitchiest anti-summer complainer in the contiguous United States. I’ve never met someone who dislikes summer as much as I do. It’s a lonely place to be, alienating, distressing and really annoying. 

So I was cheered to see in today’s paper a story about summer seasonal affective disorder, described as a “less common and much less understood counterpart to seasonal affective disorder, or SAD, a recurring pattern of depression that comes on in fall and winter.” (Those are the people who get all boo-hooey when the mercury hits a lovely 55.)

At last, some scientific scaffolding supporting my rare condition of hating the hot months with, well, fiery passion. I do not get SAD in the winter or fall. I get glad. I get ecstatic. I chortle to myself like a madman.

But come spring and summer, right about April, I plummet into a tar pit of depression, exacerbated by all that makes heat fans positively joyous: revealing clothing, sunshine, sweat, long days, crowds, barbecues, picnics and anything else outdoors, including street festivals, beach frolics and concerts in the park. 

What vexes me so? Let’s ask a simpatico writer at Cosmopolitan: “I hate the pretty trees in the park that blow pollen directly into my sinuses. I hate the flies, mosquitoes, the wasps, and the ants. I like my coffee hot, my temperatures cold, and my limbs swaddled in at least two layers of fabric.” 

I wonder if she’s single.

Spurning summer is like dissing Disneyland or burning the flag — it’s socially unacceptable, frowned upon and deeply confounding to the rabble. It’s downright un-American. The social pressure to feel summery when the sun is shining, to beam about how “nice” it is when it’s a Dante-esque 88 degrees, is obscene and fascist.  

“To reveal that you hate society’s favorite season is to reveal yourself as an enemy of humanity,” Cosmopolitan says. “I’m seen as the bummer who hates fun.”

So am I. And I’m tired of it. It recalls those super “fun” people who try to drag you out on the dance floor when you truly, definitively do not want to dance. What I wouldn’t do for a large polo mallet.

“If you don’t want to go to a beach or hike to a swimming hole or drink a spritz on some roof, you give the impression of sourness, as if you’re an ogre who just doesn’t know how to relax, man,” writes the New York Times. “If you don’t want to watch a movie in a park, you feel like such a grouch, an Eeyore who should be out there summering.”

I’m getting better at telling Ray-Banned fans of sand, Frisbees, perspiration, flies and overcooked carcinogens to buzz off. Only in recent years have I caved to wearing shorts on hot days, but I’ve stopped doing summer activities I don’t want to do, be it ambling through Central Park, watching parades or swimming in any body of water. 

I can do without swamp ass, snow cones, sunburn, kayaks, heat-induced comas, hordes, and, as Vogue so deliciously points out, “some dude wearing flip-flops, airing his gnarly toenails.”

Henry James — a hell of a writer. Yet he wrote this: “Summer afternoon — summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.” Henry James — also psychotic.

Pity me, for recall that I am afflicted with “summer seasonal affective disorder,” the scientific excuse for all my bellyaching. No, don’t pity me. Because there is, despite what the old song says, a cure for the summertime blues. I chill, literally: A/C set at 68, fans blowing, icy gin and tonic in hand, visions of skiing and wrestling yetis.

“If you’re reading this and you’re a fellow summer hater, let us make our stand now,” says a defiant Independent scribe, who gets the last word.

“Let’s shout it from the shadiest rooftops. Let’s whisper it from behind our curtains, with our air-conditioning units on. This summer, let’s stay in, and feel no shame.” 

The pleasures and perils of reading outside

~ Chris ~ 1 Comment

Reading outdoors is an ambiguous business. I’m an outdoor-reading veteran, a pastime that unites something I adore — reading — with something I barely tolerate — the outdoors. 

Yet occasionally a switch of scenery is required and I’ll dust off a patio chair at a spiffy sidewalk cafe and do the old curl-up with a crisp new paperback. Way back when, I’d try to read old-school newspapers while lounging on the beach, furiously fighting the wispy pages to stay put in the seaside gales. Without fail, a page corner would poke me in the eye and a full page would slap my cheeks. Repeatedly.

That’s how reading outdoors can be ambiguous. I was reminded of this today, a partly cloudy, 64-degree afternoon, when I fancied a book and a breeze would be a peachy idea. I grabbed my reading and hit the backyard deck thinking what a clever boy I am. 

After recently tearing through two new novels — “Whereabouts” by Jhumpa Lahiri and “Second Place” by Rachel Cusk, both ethereal, psychologically astute gems — I’m onto the Ralph Ellison classic “Invisible Man,” which even in its early pages is searing. Propulsive, savage, uncompromising — perfect for a glimmering spring day.

I lasted about 25 minutes out there. The clouds kept stubbornly shifting, sealing off the sky for jacket-ready cool, then opening to a sunscreen-ready radiance. Hopscotching moods, it was atmospheric ADD. 

I sniffled as puffs of wind released flurries of pollen over me, and my bookmark fluttered into the fresh, fragrant mulch. The chilly breezes, swaying shrubs and twisting trees, sent me back inside with grumbling memories of beach vs. newspaper. 

Mother Nature was playing with me, smudging the border between winter and spring, which had its calendrical kick-off March 20. (Summer — insufferable with its perplexing pleasures — arrives June 21, an annual day of mourning.) How else do you explain today’s crazy, veering temperatures? Nature knows how to confound. Watch how she drives meteorologists bat shit.

And she knows how to boomerang me back inside, onto the cushy Eames chair, body gently reclined, feet up, “Invisible Man” in hand, and not a mote of dusty golden pollen to spur the sneeze and wheeze.

This tiff with the elements isn’t over, and its history is rich. Just last week I was reading the Rachel Cusk novel on the deck in fine balmy air, the only irritant a black hairy bumblebee the size of a condor that decided it wanted my friendship. It buzzed and bothered; I swung and swatted. The encounter was a truce.  

I coulda been killed out there. What next while I’m reading amidst flora and fauna, burly bumblebees and erratic skies? Rabid chipmunks? A biblical hail storm? The next-door neighbor trying small talk over the fence? (I’ll take rabid woodland animals over that.)

Summer’s thermal terrors are fast coming and I will spend most of the hot months indoors, hands on the latest talked-up book or dog-eared classic. Inside it’s dark and dank, the only breeze wafting from A/C vents, the only deluge the torrent of words I’m reading, the only vicious creature a scruffy terrier mix named Cubby, who can be effectively disarmed with a hearty belly rub or a good Jack Reacher thriller. Much like me.