La La Land June Gloom The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow

An Excerpt from the humor book The Misery Manifesto

The Sun Will Come Out Tomorow?

In the United States, as in most of the sad world, you have weather. You have a variety of weather patterns and temperature changes, as well as four seasons. This isn’t the case in coastal Southern California. As you know, we’re special.In Los Angeles, we have consistently perfect weather — sunny with temperatures in the seventies. It’s a truly reasonable climate that only the most miserable among us (usually transplanted New Yorkers) find unacceptable. These are the cranks who complain about unending sunshine and clear skies as if it’s a bad thing. “I miss the seasons,” they whine.However, even for the easy to please, there is an ugly shoofly in The Endless Summer of SoCal . . . and that is the infamous “June Gloom.”

JUNE GLOOM

According to Wikipedia (who else?), June Gloom is “a weather pattern that results in cloudy, overcast skies with cool temperatures during the late spring and early summer, most commonly in the month of June.” (This is why it’s not called February Gloom.)“Low-altitude stratus clouds are formed over the ocean, then transported over the coastal regions by the wind.”Translation: June Gloom is a month-long period of fog and drizzle up the yahoo where you feel like an abuse victim in a never-ending Bergman movie. I call it "50 Shades of L.A. Gray."June Gloom should be a bona fide mental disorder ordained by the American Psychiatric Association. It’s Los Angeles’s version of a seasonal affective disorder.

We all know that long, snowy winters with subzero temperatures are depressing. But, after all, that’s what you ordered if you live in Butte, Montana, or Caribou, Maine.  Not La La Land!

HERE COMES THE SUN?

It’s all about expectations. In Southern California coastal regions (aka the beach), we expect to see and feel the sun—duh! After all, we don’t go to the beach for the rain. It’s disconcerting to gaze out your window in Malibu and see nothing but gray clouds and white fog. Geez! Is it snowing? You can kiss that million-dollar view good-bye for a month or two. June has no mercy.True—snow, sleet, and hail are direct assaults on the mood, but they’re for sissies. Fog and drizzle are insidious . . .  the guerrilla warfare of weather. They, hang over your head like an ominous dark cloud and tease you with a feeble ray of sunlight every hour or so. This generates false, painful hope in the hapless optimist. As many know too well, “Hollywood will kill you with its optimism.”June Gloom is the original Summer Bummer.The Misery Manifesto: A Self-Help Parody for the Self-Absorbed on Amazon