Before the Fall

While getting ready for my imminent trip to the Bay Area -- I leave for the airport in two hours -- I naturally found myself doing the least practical thing imaginable, namely rifling through my many piles of "special" items I'd meant to scan and write about in search of the double-exposure shots of UC Berkeley's Greek Theater I shot in May, 1989. It actually didn't take that long to get what I wanted. And I secured the added bonus of seeing other photos from that roll, which was taken over one of the most emotionally exhausting stretches of my life. This one condenses the mixture of sadness and joy, fear and promise that marked that period, a confused state of mind that led me to the long-term relationship in which I would go on to spend the better part of my existence:

That was a very odd time for my family and my relation to it, filled with the sort of drama that our Northern European heritage normally filtered out. But what I remember best about the three week stay at my parents' house in Maryland during which this photo was taken is the unbearable heat and humidity -- they still hadn't fixed the air conditioning unit that broke shortly after we'd moved there a decade before -- and the way it drove me to drink beer during the day as my then-partner and I watched coverage of the Tiananmen Square uprising. That and late-night television sessions in the basement featuring, of all things, reruns of the series Hart To Hart.

Personally, I'd Rather Be Blinded By Sameness

While finishing up my packing a few minutes ago, I decided to check the weather at my destination. Since the site I use provides me my current location as a default, though, I got to see the 105+ temperatures predicted for the rest of the week here. I was hoping that the increased humidity today might betoken a slight chance of pre-Monsoon storm activity, but it appears that the days I'm gone will be hot, sunny and dry as a bone, as his typical for late June in the Sonoran Desert.

After I had typed "94720" into the site's location box and was waiting for the report to load, I chided myself for having become so estranged from the Bay Area that I felt the need to look up what I would once have taken on faith. Sure enough, the report was the mind-numbingly repetitious sort that characterize summers on the California coast, with the sole item of interest the possibility that "June gloom" might be less intense than is often the case:

I'm sure there are some who would argue that those temperatures are oppressively cool. These are the sort, often elderly, who move to Tucson not only to stay warm in winter but to bake themselves in the heat of summer. Some of them even complain when it rains. Needless to say, my own preferences are radically opposed to theirs. I'd be perfectly happy to live with the boredom of a Bay Area summer over the excitement of other climes. I do love the Monsoon, mind you, and would want to visit Tucson to experience it should I ever move away. But the thrill of the storms is not enough to compensate for the brutality of the dry season that precedes them.