Floating on

It's been rainy and sunny at the same time all day and a little chilly, especially with the wind gusts. Everyone here thinks it's so cold and I laugh, the same way I laugh at people from the South or California who think fifty degrees in winter is cold. I've heard Jerusalem might get a dusting of snow after midnight, which might also hit here, but that was on Twitter so who knows if it will really happen. Even if it does it will be melted and warmed up enough to not feel like winter by the time I get up. The humidity is really something.

The Med's pretty rough today - white caps are aplenty. It sort of looks like a river good for whitewater rafting, if you can ignore that it stretches to the horizon...and now...the storm clouds are coming in...a ship is coming into port (how the heck do those things float?)...Beirut darkens...and the sea disappears.

But a few minutes later, it returns, and another ship, this one leaving Beirut, appears from beneath the nothingness. For where? What does it carry? Lebanese oranges? Beiruti bananas? Hizbollah drugs and weapons?

The gray has already lifted, revealing patches of blue that make the Mediterranean what it is, a way of life, the color of the soul. Fluffy white clouds laced with the yellow tint of evening follow what had once been darkness. In twenty minutes, a storm was here, then gone, leaving behind the sound of tires splashing through puddles, and what puddles there are, like in any old town, like in Washington, USA, turning the streets into rivers, and mud comes from seemingly nowhere to be suddenly everywhere.