New York City: 10.27.16.

It was raining and you could feel it through your layers, the wet finding its way through so-called imperables, seeping up and under until your bones felt a chill. So let’s say that’s why the rain is for poets what hamburgers are for certain American filmmakers: A cipher to express the state of the world. Some claim joy from it others die after prolonged exposure. How could you help but not notice the way the rain substituted for certain emotions? We’d all just seen “Moonlight” after all. *Note: Go see it and hope that it’s raining. And maybe eat hamburger after. Yesterday, do you remember it? Colder still and with hollowing-out breezes. Yet, folks were walking up and down the streets of SoHo and talking about what Christmas presents to get their kids and their friends’s kids. It almost made the ads for holiday movies (be gone Halloween movies!) make sense. In hours, however, everything would change and with it come the rain, making us want to cry for reasons we could feasibly peg to affecting cultural moments. Or was it that the water that streaks down a face in a rainstorms is pure of emotional weight unless we give it the gravity of sadness?