keyword: calendar, title: it pours in "the next big thing" flash fiction

There’s not much need for a calendar in Southern California, certainly not inside the Thirty-Mile Zone. There are only two seasons of any significance in Los Angeles, the season of fires and the much-shorter season of rain, that’s about it. Everything else just book-keeping for reservations at Spago or to know when holiday fireworks force you to hide the dogs for the weekend. Other than whether the distant exurbs will be burning or flooding, the months are mere frippery.

From a few weeks before Christmas to just after Valentines, the marine layer will take hold off of the ocean and the sky intermittently pisses drizzles until the Pacific’s bladder is finally sated.

The other ten months, you just watching the skies for where the black smoke’s coming from this week, as if awaiting the next pope of arson’s coronation. Sylmar’s squalid trailer parks up north? Maybe the strip malls Moorpark west, maybe Montrose out east, everyone at the edge of endless urban sprawl taking their turn charred down to post-apocalyptic cinders.

Is it the magic of The Curse that makes the weather that way? Climate change? The fool’s errand of placing ten million people in a shallow pit between chaparral desert and azurite sea? Maybe a touch of all three, maybe God just hates that damned James Taylor song so much She lays down deluge and inferno in equal kind. I wouldn’t blame God, soft rock’s a plague on all Her creation.

What is undeniably part of The Curse of The Thirty-Mile Zone, however, is the way everyone forgets how to drive in the rain when the actual weather returns each winter. A city filled with Northeastern and Midwestern transplants who once knew how to drive through blizzards and hurricanes promptly forgets how to navigate cars through even a mist. Instead of driving a bit slower and more cautiously as they would have in White Plains or Omaha, everyone suddenly drives either eighty-one or eighteen in the presence of even one drop of water. Because they’re magically impelled to see all as they want to see it. Some need to be afraid, so they drive as if a national emergency, some need to pretend themselves invincible and so they see nothing at all.

Both end in domino-rallies of sickening fender-benders of automobiles uninsured for collision and bodies uninsured for injury, from the freeway all the way to the horizon of the empty sea.

That other terrible soft rock song was also wrong, it sometimes rains in Southern California and it almost never pours but that’s not how the people there are conditioned to see their lives. They came as either refugees or fame-seekers, sometimes even both, so they all can only see the very best or very worst coming down the pike and drive like it too. It usually ends in smoking twisted metal, either way, whether by over-cautiousness or total lack thereof.

Yes, that’s a metaphor for how my life there sorted out as well. Complete coincidence, of course.

Last updated June 25, 2019