Kyle Talks About the Weather

It seems—at least in the case of Western culture, the only culture that I have any real experience with—that when strangers or acquaintances or even best of friends and family try to start or continue conversation, there is a point of inevitable silence which introduces a degree of unrest and uncertainty and discomfort that can cause nervous habits to appear out of thin air like nail biting, excessive blinking, tracing invisible marks on tables with a finger, desperate attempts to avoid eye contact, and tiny fake coughs that sound like you’re trying to clear your throat but all you’re really doing is making the other party anticipate you saying something but you don’t say anything and as a result the silence continues until someone finally, inevitably brings up the weather. It really does not matter whether it’s your bff or a homeless man sharing a park bench with you, the weather is something that we have all experienced and it’s something we experience every day and it provides excellent fodder for light, meaningless conversation. And this phenomenon takes place between the closest of friends, too, because it is hardly humanly possible to only ever talk about serious matters like analytic philosophy, continental philosophy, Romantic literature, transcendentalism, ecocriticism, post-modernism, post-structuralism (when talking about post-structuralism, it usually involves people talking about things they really don’t know about in order to appear smarter than they really are), art, politics, religion, and bands that you’ve been listening to that no one else has even heard of yet. Sometimes you need a break from the serious. Sometimes you just aren’t drunk enough. Sometimes you need to talk about the weather.

“Crazy weather we’ve been having lately.”

“Yeah, it’s like it can’t make up its mind.”

“I’d buy an umbrella, but then it’d stop raining.”

“Sound logic, Kyle.”

-or-

“Beautiful weather we’re having.”

“Oh, it’s so lovely! A perfect time to sit in the park and read a book and relax and listen to the birds fucking.”

The weather in Sydney today has been erratic. I wake up and it’s sunny. I go out and it rains. I get some coffee; it’s sunny. I walk to a park; it rains. I get some dinner at a café and sit outside because it’s the only available seat, and it’s sunny and cloudy and really windy and it rains and pours and stops and starts and blows my menu away into the street.

After eating my bean nachos and drinking a whole pitcher of water, I wander over to gleebooks because it’s close and it’s a good bookstore. I look around on the first floor a bit and head upstairs where they have some used fiction. When I get up there and start leafing through books I’ve been considering buying for about two weeks, it starts to violently pour. I guess I should settle in here, I think, and wait for the rain to stop before I go outside. Maybe I should buy an umbrella.

So I’m sitting on this little stepping stool leafing through The Satanic Verses trying to decided if I want to buy it and telling myself I don’t have enough room and that I’m only about a quarter of the way through DeLillo’s Underworld and that I should really finish that before I start on another thick book. There’s also a biography on Anton Chekhov that I’m considering as a break from my constant consumption of fiction. While I’m leafing through other books by authors I’ve never heard of there is a loud crash. It came from the roof. I look over and it’s raining in the bookstore. Just a small section of the bookstore is raining, but it isn’t everyday you see it rain at all inside bookstores. It was only me, another man, and a woman behind the counter in the upstairs portion of gleebooks. I almost laughed as I saw the rain come pouring in, but I thought that it wasn’t too funny that it was raining in a bookstore and thought it might be rude to laugh at the misfortune of the store. Fortunately for the books, it was raining where there weren’t any. I just smiled like an idiot instead of laughing like a fool as the woman and man moved a few tables to ensure that none of the books would get wet should the hole in the skylight grow larger.

All of the indoor rain made me have to pee, so I just sat tight on the stool until the rain finally let up so I could leave the store and find an establishment with a toilet for my convenience. As I was leaving I heard the woman on the phone suggest that they get someone with a tarp to try to cover the hole, and it made me wonder how easy it’d be to get on the roof of the bookstore.