It’s intriguing what good weather can do to people. 

Take San Diego for example.  Enter a manicured landscape of obediently uniform palm trees, Volkswagen beetles used as canvases, and curbside dispensers of doggie walk bags.  The streets have hardly met with ice in all their years—excepting the occasional 2 a.m. dropped daiquiri—and are now prowled by a demographic often referred to as “troubled youth” whose shoulders prop up boom boxes blasting smooth jazz, so smooth I’m pretty sure I’ve heard the same tunes while on hold with miscellaneous tech support hotlines.  Such an absence of profanity, such a distortion of teenage rebellion, threatens to erode the erosion of society.

But San Diego is the eighth largest city in America, the census takers say.   Where is that big city attitude when everyone says hello to you in the street?   Even a homeless man, who was pushing a shopping cart stocked with a yoga mat and a batting helmet, gave me a neighborly greeting-with-hand-wave. 

Delicious, dry-heat afternoons have emboldened the restaurateurs of San Diego’s Little Italy to reach new, geographically-promiscuous dimensions of fusion dining.  Their Italian restaurants push curious specials of chicken gumbo while a British pub smugly occupies the dead center of the district.

Better yet, the sun has inspired the city to unleash a fiesta of urban renewal, culminating in a baseball diamond built in the center of downtown five years ago.  Used to thinking of a major league ballpark as being surrounded by a moat of parking lots, I was caught confused and cockeyed when I encountered a swarm of buoyant foot traffic on the sidewalk, figuring the folks were exiting a bar after watching the Padres complete their sweep of the Cubs on television.   Well, they had certainly watched the game, sans beer commercials, because I had just walked past the stadium itself, which was surrounded on three sides by condos and high-rises (avoid the traffic and watch from the game from your balcony!).  For those folks who don’t feel American without parking lots, don’t fret: half the downtown streets had to be re-routed in a useless attempt to evacuate thousands of car people back to their homes in the burbs.

But wait: there is trouble in paradise after all.  May and June are some of the worst months for San Diego weather.  During that unfortunate stretch, the San Diegans find their mornings a little chilly, with all those pesky sea breezes cooling down the city at night to an intolerably frosty 68 degrees.  The mornings might even be cloudy, and the sun might not bust through until—get this—10 am!   How do they keep their heads high?

And there’s even a name for it: June Gloom.  (I was there at the end of May, but I suppose May Gloom doesn’t have the same ring to it.)  The locals find it so depressing that the city has given up on eating breakfast.  Either that, or a gumbo mafia is at work in San Diego, bullying some of the people into paying $21 for scrambled eggs at the hotel restaurants, while funneling the rest of the hungry folks into an hour-long line in front of Richard Walker’s Perverted Pancake House, home of the friendly girl wearing waffles as pasties.  Keep your whipped cream to yourself.

Speaking of breasts, the military has an intense interest in them.  San Diego’s military bases have their own weekly events paper, four-fifths of which is comprised of ads for breast enlargements: the new Kevlar, apparently.  And much more flattering than a chest-flattening flak vest.

Weather alone cannot do this to people, you protest.  You are quick to point out that a good chunk of the city is in the flight path of the airport, denying the residents of sleep and unscrambled thoughts.  But for San Diego, the jets seem to come in handy, effectively drowning out the tourists demanding a bite of the special waffles in the advertisement.