As a curmudgeon with a romantic streak, I always found the weather in San Francisco to be perfect for me, as it accommodated my leanings toward the lugubrious as perfectly as it did my occasional gurglings of glassy-eyed sentimentality. For most of the summer, temperatures are rarely above 72, skies are ridiculously blue, and everything is seen with such clarity, like when you walk out of the optometrist's wearing contact lenses with a freshly-updated prescription. These days go on seemingly endlessly, one after another. Crisp sea breezes, sailboats on the bay, so picture perfect as to verge on the twee. In the evening, jacket weather, just right for the epic meandering nighttime walks I began to take once I got laid off.

Late in the summer, fog begins to roll in nightly from the ocean. We're talking serious fog here, city fog. Dickens fog as opposed to Bronte fog. I would sit in my eighth-floor apartment and watch it slither in. Fog suggests layers of knowability in the buildings and objects it surrounds, people and things emerge from fog and disappear into fog. Fog hints that everything might not be exactly as it seems, just right for someone who tends to see a rictus of banality in every smiling face (too many years working in retail I suppose).

The year I lost my job, I got into the habit of taking long walks in the middle of the night. Lonely wind-buffeted traffic lights hovering in fog lent an air of Lynchian menace which I found soothing. I liked to walk around the deserted downtown area after midnight, imagining with satisfaction my unsolved murder. I'd go missing, there'd be unanswered phone calls, friends would pace and speculate to one another nervously with hooded eyes. Days would go by, a mounting sense of panic amongst my small but devoted set. I'd be an item on the local news, an unflatteringly accurate snapshot of me over the simple legend "Missing". Flyers would appear on posts around town, strangers stopping to glance, momentarily shivering with an awareness of life's unpredictability, then off they'd go a moment later, to Crate and Barrel, laughing into cell phones. Eventually, the news would report a "grim discovery", my lifeless body found in a dumpster behind a dim sum palace in Chinatown, say, or stuffed behind bushy foliage in an off-the-beaten path area of Golden Gate Park reported to be "frequented by cruising homosexuals", the smug viewer left to draw his own smug conclusions. These ghoulish but satisfying fantasies would be worked up in elaborate detail as I walked the lonely streets, imagining the shameful deceptions and corrosive secrets behind locked iron gates and pulled shades. Nothing seemed mundane on nights like those.

As summer wears on, however, the lack of rain begins to mean a slow buildup of city grime, engine pollutants, and windswept piles of debris. The warmest months are after Labor Day, September and October. It's now too warm, and more humid, people are suddenly ugly and sallow, the sidewalks greasy and foul-smelling as acrid piles of filth collect in gutters and corners. Loathsome tourists clog the streets, throngs of ruddy loud Australians in hideous too-short white pants, young annoyingly competent Germans hoisting preposterously large backpacks, entire Japanese families walking arm in arm, effectively blocking the sidewalk. Then finally the rains come, the tourists go home, it gets colder and darker. Once it starts to rain in San Francisco you sense it might not stop until springtime. Winter means no sun, ever, pouring rain, and bleak frigid nights. In other words, after so many sunny days, perfect.