Joan Didion said that "it is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination....Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability."
I'm with Kevin. That sounds absurd to me. Aside from the times when the Santa Ana winds help spread raging fires, they're just wind. They occasionally gave my father migraines. They impinged on my life little beyond that. And nor is the weather in Southern California "the weather of catastrophe." It's generally the weather of beach going. I often say that I never understood what people meant with the cliche of "discussing the weather" until I moved to DC, as in Los Angeles, there was nothing to discuss. How would that conversation even go?
"It was 76 yesterday, it's 76 today, it'll be 76 tomorrow," I'd say, gazing out towards the pavement, and the SUVs. "Yep," my straw-chewing friend would grunt from his porch, where he was sunning himself on a yoga mat.
