Currently playing: Levitate pt. 2 by Idaho

LA hunkers down under the rain now.

I drove to work this morning before it started. It is a mild rain. Still, the evening news will yell on yammering about it interviewing the citizenry ("Yeah, wow. I had to turn my wipers on high..." "Yeah, I brought an umbrella in the car today...") and will repetitively feature the same stock shots of suv's four-wheeling it over medians in sloshing intersections.

But LA secretly loves the rain. We bitch, we moan and complain, but we stick to the lurid details on the television, magnetically charged by the shifting air pressures; the city needs constant redemptions and cleansings, its buildings gone grey with dust from too many trucks headed west out of the central parts of our leftward-leaning nation; the manifest destiny, too many of us running as far and as fast as we can and causing the earth to sink and shudder beneath our weight; and every locked-straight streetcorner is screaming for clarity, stumbling on the trail of a confessional, a dousing, with no real river to wash over us--

The city is a desperate pentinent before the rain, and the crazy red flowers in the cemetery, slowly soaking through basketed bouquets of poinsetta and juniper sopping and brilliantly vivid against the gray air, randomly here and there, the single canting christmas tree stuck atop one headstone, slanted and keeling, an incongruous pine iceberg atop a placid damp sea of grass, its tinsel made dull by the clouded low-light, giving the lie to what is beneath.