It is an ill wind that bloweth no man to good.-- John Heywood, Proverbs.[T]hose hot dry [winds] that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen.-- Raymond Chandler, "Red Wind."I have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I know it, and almost everyone I have seen today knows it too. We know it because we feel it. The baby frets. The maid sulks. I rekindle a waning argument with the telephone company, then cut my losses and lie down, given over to whatever it is in the air. To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior.-- Joan Didion, "Santa Ana," Slouching Towards Bethlehem.
This week brings our first Santa Ana condition of the season, hot dry desert winds that blow to the sea. My skin crinkles, then it crawls, my hair and clothing crackle with static, my sinuses dry out, cracking and causing nosebleeds, my head throbs, my mood darkens and I just wanna pound someone.
Some like the Santa Anas. That only makes it worse. Cheery weathermen gush with excitement: "It'll be another beautiful sunny day!" Yeah, perfect weather for mummification, sucking us dry while preserving your unnaturally youthful good looks for eternity.
My mother-in-law loves the Santa Anas. She's a lizard at heart, cold unless she's sitting under a blazing sun being blasted by winds straight from the furnaces of hell. We live in prime Santa Ana territory, near her. She knows I hate the Santa Anas and she knows I'd rather live up the coast, far from the reach of the Santa Anas (which would, incidentally, place us far from her). So as the winds from hell are blowing, as I'm clenching and unclenching my fingers in antsiness and uneasiness, she puts a happy face on the situation, urging me to listen to the song of the blowing winds, to breath the clean air, to pity those poor northerners, drenched in yet another rain storm. I like my mother-in-law, and I'd never dream of moving away from her, so I refrain from strangling her.
One piece of advice, should you ever find yourself in Southern California during a Santa Ana condition: Do not, under any circumstances, get a haircut. Today as I walked to my barber's, the Santa Ana winds blew through my hair, depositing static charges on each follicle and drying out my scalp. By the time I arrived at the barber's, my skin was crawling and my scalp was writhing. I could distinctly feel each jittery hair fretting about my hydra-head, alternately attracted and repelled by the electric charges built-up on its neighboring hairs. I plopped into the chair and ordered my barber to shave it all off.
Thankfully, he knows me well and talked me off the ledge, just as he's done many times before. He cut it a little shorter and worked some dippity-doo in to repel static and replace some of the missing moisture. But your barber may not be as perceptive, so your results may not be as pleasing. Don't take the chance. Wait for the Santa Ana to end.
Thanks to Rana at Frogs and Ravens for getting me started on this.
Nice! (I love seeing how people take an idea they raised in comments and go on to spin it into something neat.)
Posted by: Rana | September 24, 2004 at 12:20 PM