Raise your hand if your mood is forcefully impacted by the weather. I'm on the struggle bus (the Hot Mess Express!) today trying to come up with something to write about, and this is specifically because the steep and rapid drop in barometric pressure on Saturday night — as the severe Independence Day thunderstorms rolled in — threw my usually bouncing and Tigger-like mental attitude into the proverbial, you know, I don't like to say "toilet," but the toilet.
My outlook is stormy. My brow is furrowed. I'm in the midst of a three-day argument with a Virtual Assistant at Amazon over the new summer clothes I ordered for my son and their failure to be delivered before he left town for two weeks. Someone, somewhere in East Hampton Village, has new underwear, white socks, and extra-long pajama bottoms and I'd like them back. My cat, the mauler named Maui the Malicious, got out of the house on Sunday morning and came back carrying a teeny-tiny, screaming, baby bunny clenched in his sharp jaws. Have you ever heard a baby bunny scream? I do not recommend it as a mood-brightener.
This isn't just New Age nonsense, assigning a correlation between weather and mood. If you believe that "forest bathing" (stupid term), swimming in the open ocean, or stargazing can inspire and uplift your spirits, you should also be prepared to believe it's possible that the hourly Doppler weather radar bears some relation to an individual's swings in emotional valence. Now it's sunny. Now we have mini-tornadoes throwing halved trees onto County Road 39.
I'm not a believer in writer's block, by the way. No one talks about writer's block much anymore, do they? But if you were raised on the American cinema of the 1970s and 1980s, you are familiar with it — the depictions of the writing life are dangerously potholed with psychological crises brought on by mysterious but deep-seated Freudian forces that prevent the writer from forming a sentence, a plot, a screenplay, a love scene. The writers (men, usually, mind you, in these depictions) agonize histrionically over the blank page and tear their hair in "Barton Fink," in "Misery," and, most dramatically, in "The Shining."
Someone made this whole writer's-block thing up, in my opinion, around about the time that Henry Miller (a writer I loathe, by the way) and Malcolm Lowry were acting like jackasses and drowning themselves in Scotch and soda. All you need to write is an idea. That's it. If you have an idea, you just write down what you think about it. That's all. If Henry and Malcolm and various other male writers of the psychoanalysis generation (I'm looking at you, Ernest Hemingway) suffered from terrible writer's block, all it really means is that they didn't have any ideas. Their ideas had dried up. Sorry, fellas!
Severe thunderstorms, rain, gray skies, and gloom are good for inspiring horror stories, apparently. Mary Shelley wrote "Frankenstein" in the summer of 1816, the famous Year Without a Summer, when the eruption of Mount Tambora in faraway Indonesia threw Europe into a season of extreme cold, incessant rain, and dark skies. (Again, I'm not making this up! I learned about it listening to Melvyn Bragg's "In Our Time." I recommend.) Severe thunderstorms, rain, gray skies, and gloom are not good for inspiring light and breezy ideas for a chit-chatty weekly column of personal musings in a small town newspaper.
Someone I used to work with told me once that she didn't like the wind. She was bothered by the wind on windy days. Can you imagine? I think maybe it scared her. I'm gifted with delight in the weather. Nothing offers a quicker blast of emotional energy than high winds. Nothing is finer than an October day and 25 knots. Like most of us, I love the rain of course, too, especially at night when I'm in bed, and nothing is finer than a good hurricane. Apocalyptic weather in a sense sets us free from the tedium of the everyday and the tyranny of our usual responsibilities: Let the emergency come! In a hurricane you no longer have to do petty and tiresome things. You don't even have to worry about them anymore.
The bad weather over the Fourth of July weekend looked a bit apocalyptic while the thunder and lightning were going blow-for-blow with Donald Trump's fireworks over the National Mall (some smiting going on there), but it didn't reach excitement (or smiting) level on Edwards Lane. It was, instead, a three-day slog and a migraine. A big branch fell onto the driveway from an old maple, narrowing missing our Honda, and the Bad Cat got out through a hole in a window screen and spent a very rainy Sunday night on the roof. I couldn't understand where the meowing was coming from on Monday morning and searched all the upstairs closets and even drawers before I located the wettest feline in American history, a sodden and very foul-tempered beast. Maui and I are now stomping around the kitchen, spitting and hissing and waiting for the sun.