lightning
i grew up in texas, which means i grew up knowing what it was like to walk around with a sweating ass.
fort worth — dfw, the metroplex — was pretty hot, though less bad than houston if i recall. you get used to it or you move away. we moved away and back often enough that i never got used to it.
every sunday, when you have to put on a pair of not-jeans to go to church you have to do some mental math. subtract the time it takes you to crank the car a/c to max from the amount of time it takes you to sweat a damp line through the back of your khakis. if your difference is negative, you are fucked.
i remember our pontiac something-or-other was jet black with a dark cloth interior, made darker by the fact that it was lined with dog hair. like climbing into a rolling kiln. my khakis never stood a chance.
arizona is a dry heat but texas is not. it is a wet heat. like i imagine hell is in the summertime.
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wednesday reminded me about the one thing i missed about the humidity. i have lived in san francisco on and off for fifteen years, and ive seen lightning and heard thunder clap exactly twice. once in 2008 when i was in the tenderloin, and once on wednesday evening.
this is what lightning looks like:
i was up late on my couch working, half-staring out the window, when i looked out the window and saw lightning. i assumed i was having a stroke since we dont have lightning here but then the thunder came and i accepted it.
the first thing i thought was how much i missed an earlier version of twitter — back when social media was primarily used for saying “woah, earthquake” or, in wednesdays case,
the second thing i thought of was when i was around eleven or so in texas. a thunderstorm had set in and on tv chief meteorologist david finfrock
was telling us that a tornado was coming. i feel like we were always watching for tornadoes, but maybe that was because bill paxton put out a movie that year.
(a parenthetical: we watched twister in my sixth grade science class once. if i were a science teacher i would absolutely be the kind of science teacher who thought “letting the kids watch twister” counted as teaching them science.)
mom, brother and i were at home but dad was at work and apparently the tornado hit their office and fucked up a good bit of their building. but dad and all the folks at his work huddled in a basement under the building, so they were all safe. it sounded scary but i didnt have a basement at my house so i guess they were safer than me. i didnt even stand under a doorframe.
in california we do not have humidity and we do not have basements.
but at least sometimes we have lightning.
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listening:
https://open.spotify.com/track/2yfUXPmp0e8CdZguIU6iCl?si=50pixD3USxyoC1dFNlE7Fg