The Devil Winds

   

I have a love / hate relationship with the Santa Ana winds

They can take a common seasonal ground swell and groom it into a thing of beauty (see above)

Something that, once seen can never be unseen.

A vision that can haunt your dreams for the rest of your days

and make you spend your life chasing a ideal wave.

You end up old and bitter. 

Never really getting it as good as that "one time". 

now that's the love part

The hate part would be what all the collected dust and pollen does to my sinuses. 

That and the chasing after my trash cans as they blow merrily down the street.

Still I have nothing on the cat's feelings about the wind

Cat's like to look sharp and nothing messes up a well groomed coat like the devil winds.

I am closing with a quote from T Pynchon's novel Inherent Vice whose description of the local winds I have always enjoyed.

"Offshore winds had been too strong to be doing the surf much good, but surfers found themselves getting up early anyway to watch the dawn weirdness, which seemed like a visible counterpart to the feeling in everybody's skin of desert winds and heat and relentlessness, with the exhaust from millions of motor vehicles mixing with microfine Mojave sand to refract the light toward the bloody end of the spectrum, everything dim, lurid and biblical, sailor-take-warning skies. The state liquor stamps over the tops of tequila bottles in the stores were coming unstuck, is how dry the air was"
Thomas Pynchon - Inherent Vice

Good read if you haven't