Whether weather

I am from Los Angeles and from the valley, the suburban sprawl that surrounds the city of Los Angeles. It is a desert. A big, terrifyingly smoggy desert. Los Angeles is one of the most lonely big cities. I have always thought of it as a place where one goes to be lost.

The weather has always been one of the problems for me. It is hot as hell. And the people are a lot less interesting than those you would imagine meeting in hell. They all want to talk about their screen plays and their head shots and the big breaks they are about to have, are having or just narrowly missed. It is tedious.

Due to birth defects and some bad luck, I possess only one kidney. This makes the Los Angeles weather even less bearable for me than for others. I am usually a couple of degrees hotter than the average, two kidney having individual. I spent most of my childhood dreaming of being somewhere cooler. Cooler in many senses.

But I have fucked up. I am somewhere equally hot, equally smoggy and somehow, worse. The expression falling from the spit into the cooking fire springs cruelly to mind.

Ulsan possess all the high temperatured unhappiness of Los Angeles, with a twist. And that twist is humidity. I have never experienced anything like it. In dry heat, one emerges from their air conditioned house and in between the air conditioning of the house and the car, they begin to get very hot and then after that, they begin to sweat. It doesn't take very long. But it is a process.

It isn't about beginning to sweat in Ulsan. As soon as you make the mistake of going outside, you are sweating. Before you can even begin to properly feel hot, you are sweating. In fact you are being sweated. You have become sweat. You have entered into the sweat of the outdoors. The world is sweating you. You can see water in the air. Your eyelids sweat in a way that catches your eyelashes and holds them open, unpleasantly. It is really, really uncalled for.

I got off a bus yesterday. And, as often happens, it was raining. But it was still hot. How the clouds can leak water onto the ground and still retain heat is beyond me. I am not one for science of any kind. But it was wrong. People, and especially women people, speak of having moments of intuitiveness, moments where they know, almost like psychics that something is a miss, that there is a nearby danger or potential problem. I had such a moment coming off that bus into hot, sticky rain.

And it's only July. August and September are reputed to be much hotter.

I seriously must have done something dreadful in a past life to find myself living in weather such as this. Possibly raping or murdering orphaned children. Or puppies.