This morning saw an export market for New York weather in downtown Los Angeles. Pedestrians in eyeshot of the corner of Figueroa and Seventh slouched around like soggy guinea hens in earth tone overcoats and hasty shelters of newspaper. (Take that, evangelical Internet newshounds! Blogging will not be *truly* ubiquitous until you can use a Dvorak web column as a hood in a sudden downpour...)

Not that even such a URL-sensitive brolly would have been much help, because the precipitation’s participation was in the form of a really muscular drizzle.

I was surrounded by casually wandering mist-curtains. I was a little indignant, actually. “Make up your frigging mind, you great self-satisfied fat motes of ambulatory ocean! Fall straight down, get blown along in a gale, or give me the secret to antigravity, because that’s the only way I can think of that you’ve the cheek to just sort of mosey around in midair like that.” Really, I should have tried holding my umbrella right in front of me, I was walking into a lot more of the stuff than was falling on me. Amazing.

And yet-

It was genuine restful. The thick mist softened the blare of traffic and seemed to surround me with an intimate enhancement of the immediate sounds of my environment, the rushing of curbside water, the cough of a doorman. It was like being in a transparent velvet-lined booth. Rushing down Seventh St. after a raid on Mickey D’s, (“I ordered a #7, not a #1,” grumble gromish grunt) I wished I wasn’t so hurried for the Metro, because around me, right there, was a morning made for quiet and the murmur of cafe conversation, and some tinny old-time jazz, like from one of those nostalgic Woody Allen movies.

(1-2-04)