I was driving home from Silver Lake tonight around 7:00 pm and I didn’t need my sunglasses as usual at the intersection of Rowena and Hyperion. All summer I’ve been staring into the sun at that intersection, but not tonight. Tonight it was dark, like, what seemed out of nowhere.
Until about three days ago, the entirety of the past month has been between 90 and 100 degrees in Los Angeles, depending on what part of the city you live in. It’s been unbearable. Nobody talked about anything other than the heat because it was so overwhelming.
The thing about the heat was, though, it distracted from the normal changes that happen this time of year, like it getting darker earlier. It was 85 degrees every night and so it didn’t really matter if it was light or dark out because it was so fucking hot.
Now it’s twenty degrees cooler at night, you can wear long sleeves during the day, and suddenly it’s pitch black out by 8:00 pm. All of these crazy indicators for fall just kind of hit all at once, like the heat has been masking the change of seasons and now it’s already happened. It’s kind of a bummer, makes me miss growing up in New England a bit where the transition to fall would be marked by mornings that one day were just crisper than usual and the leaves on the tree would start to change color.
Then again this could be all due to the climate crisis and within five years southern California will be completely unlivable.
