A Slight Insurrection off 9th Street

I wonder if these sorts of clouds change the kind of thoughts people get. That certain prance in the sky, there. Do people come to different conclusions because of the manipulations of the weather? Are we merely creatures of circumstance? Auspices be damned. We’re drifters, at best. Clamped to the vagaries of storm patterns and currents. Blowy afternoons stored in some belated fog of the mind, reassured to lighter times. Nobody’s working any wonders here. The rain keeps you indoors and crabby, and perhaps a tad romantic. And that sudden bright of clearing skies inspires notes of better times just up ahead. Cars become unparked. People go haywire with bursts of joy. Colds stop making the rounds. And then, just when you thought the world was all puddle-wonderful and skippy, here comes another torrential downpour to lessen the festivities. Cirrus blooms wiggling hunted in a vermillion field. Chunks and tessellated strands of cumulus and stratocumulus licked taupe and orange by sunrise. Hung tubas and clear anvils of cumulonimbus dissipating at dusk. A dark, menacing arcus, rolling and ragged, rosier in a storm’s hindsight. Thin velum sheets, accessories wrapped like an apron around a nimbostratus’s belly. And the stolid, mustachioed weatherman chimes, “A circular fall-streak hole occasionally forms in a thin layer of supercooled altocumulus or cirrocumulus. Fall streaks consisting of virga or wisps of cirrus are usually seen beneath the hole as ice crystals fall out to a lower altitude. And more wet weather on the way for your morning commute.” We all gaze upward in lost moments of wonder, maybe losing our minds a bit in the yellowing cirrus fibratus intortus formed into a Kármán vortex street at evening twilight. Waiting for the bus. Caught between love and loss. Clipped to a cooler remembrance of things that’ve gone for good by the orographic lift of a windy afternoon’s dissipation. We are creatures of habit and conclusions, spittle of worry and haste tossed on credit-card bought solace, curtained vassals of stowed grief. The scent of umbrellas opening. Raspy notions instilled blank in the fading circumstances of daylight. Politics and plane rides. Grudges and euphoria. Dried dog shit and a used condom in a treewell. All this, and you are lucky to be alive, too. The curt blurt of a junk-ship-shaped slice of moon paving night’s dead-end job with a sprinkling of glitter as you take the…