Evil meltemi madness

I’m down on the Florida coast now, staying with family. The weather is beautiful, the dissertation is happening, and relaxation is simultaneously in full effect.

Blog writing spot.

Yes, unbelievers, that IS the sunrise. Which I have gotten up to see three times this week.

Unfortunately, my lovely peace of mind is beginning to fray as I’ve become increasingly more twitchy. And let me tell you why.

It’s the damn wind. When I first got here, the trees were still and the water was flat. Then a steady wind picked up on Monday and it hasn’t stopped since. Granted, it’s only about 15-20 miles per hour from the east, which is really no big whoop. The problem is that it’s incessant, all day and all night, with no lull. Wind in palm fronds may be one of my all time favorite sounds, but even that is starting to grate on my ears.

It’s like the meltemi, that summer wind in the Mediterranean that comes barreling through and drives the sea into a froth too dangerous to sail. Ferries stay docked and tourists complain; people sit idle and impatient; but mostly the wind just continues and doesn’t cease. I keep reading on the internet that people love the meltemi because it cools things down, but that’s not what I remember hearing in the Greek islands. Instead, there was a mixed and strained relationship with the wind - it could be soothing on occasion, but it was also infernal because it just NEVER ENDED. The constant sound of it, the constant feel of it, the constant frustration of having to right things that had been knocked over, the race to catch items before they blew away, the need to always raise your voice. I particularly remember the relentless snapping and tangling of my hair, sticking in my eyes and the corner of my mouth and twisting in my face. Eventually you just had to give up and sit in silence with your eyes shut tight, letting the wind coil around you and do its worst.

Googled painting of the meltemi by Caroline Huff.

It’s just those sorts of moments when the rumors of meltemi madness make complete sense. I don’t know if those rumors are true, of course, but I often heard about how the meltemi could make people completely lose it. People would just …snap. It may sound ridiculous, but there’s something intensely disturbing and uncanny about that hot endless wind, and the frustration it causes can just build and build until you’re ready to have a nervous breakdown. It actually feels like bad luck slithering across your skin. Even familial violence and murder were ascribed to that evil wind and I tell you, the sinister madness caused by the meltemi seemed completely understandable.

Anyways, I’m feeling a bit meltemi crazy at the moment, like I need to go run 10 miles or chop down a tree or something. I just want it to STOP, to be silent, to be still.

This is the moment when I’ll do the smart and sane thing. I’ll close the windows and go inside. And put in ear plugs.

RIP Vinyl Fever

Because I got my Master's at Florida State, I had the pleasure of living in Tallahassee for three years. During my second year there, I grew tired of taking out student loans and decided to get a job to augment my incredibly meagre stipend. Initially I worked at Waterworks as a cocktail waitress on the weekends, but not long after I also began working at Vinyl Fever, Tallahassee's best-loved independent record store. I was also a TA, of course, so you can imagine that my translations of Euripides and Tibullus suffered to a certain - ahem- extent.

I worked at Vinyl Fever for about a year before I decided I just couldn't handle the two jobs on top of TAing and my own grad classes. At that point I made one of my great mistakes and one that I regret to this day - instead of quitting my job at Waterworks, I quit my job at the Feve. I didn't really think about it too much then, so I didn't register the fact that monetarily it would have been in my interests to stay at the record store (especially given the vagaries of waitressing in contrast to the Feve's employee discount). Most importantly, for my own peace of mind and happiness, staying at Vinyl would have been far and away the better choice. I desperately want a time-machine so I can go back six years and slap myself, hard, for being such a moron.

Vinyl Fever. (Pics from Lee, former owner.)

Vinyl Fever was not the first record store I worked at that died a terrible death. When I was an undergrad at Virginia Tech, I worked at Crossroad's, Blacksburg's awesome-est independent music store (take that, Record Exchange!). Eventually the owner of Crossroads bought out a competitor, transformed us into a movie-rental record store, and set us on the relatively brief slippery slope to 'going-out-of-business.' (Technically it still exists, but in a new location and not at all the same store I worked at in 2000.) And while that was sad, it was nowhere near as apocalyptically terrible as Vinyl Fever closing today, February 14th, 2010.

Vinyl Fever ruled. It had a kick-ass selection of new discs, used and vinyl.


It had tons of character, and because it had been around for many years, it was full of junk past employees had made or left behind.

The Wall of Shame. Every kid caught stealing had their polaroid taken and posted in the back. The pictures stretched all the way through the 90s.

The customers were cool, especially the ones who came back every week and wanted to talk shop with you. Best of all, of course, were my fellow employees. You know all those stereotypes out there about nerdy record store emps? They're actually correct, for the most part. I think Vinyl Fever was good at keeping out the totally pretentious people and instead somehow managed (at least when I worked there) to employee awesome, funny, down-to-earth, and seriously earnest kids.

Kirk Lawrence in the Vinyl Fever parking lot, the day a DeLorean came.

That's the thing about record store employees. They're incredibly passionate. Now, I've worked in all sorts of retail and service jobs, from media outlets to pizza delivery to grocery stores to restaurants. And nowhere, of all the places that I've worked, have my co-workers been so excited, so into the product that they sell, so much fun to be around.

My Stones Throw Records display. We made this the day Ian Mott (of Poster Job fame) and I decided we were tired of not getting any free promos from Stones Throw; we plastered up the display and sent the label a picture in the hopes that they would send us some free schwag. They never replied. Thanks for nothing, Peanut Butter Wolf!

As you can imagine, Vinyl Fever has developed into a mythical sort of place in my memory, my time there a Golden Age...literally - my memories of it are tinged with the hot afternoon light that used to slant in through the windows and 1) make everything glow, and 2) blind us all. For me, Vinyl Fever embodies a time when I was still wild and young and carefree, a time before I sold my soul to academia. Knowing that the doors are closing for the final time today makes a little part of me die inside. It's as if the invisible Gates to Fairie are shutting forever and thus sucking all the magic out of the world. The comforting fact that Vinyl Fever is still trucking along with Tom Richardson at the helm can no longer be the foundation for my nostalgic vision of Tallahassee. It's a terrible day for me, personally, and for all fans of independent record stores, everywhere.

Woe to the world. An Era ends.

Sand Storms: The Revenge of Tatooine

I am still trying to figure out why I am not entirely healthy yet, ten days into my cold. Up to now, I've been blaming it on the lymph node infection I've had, assuming that a common cold will be much more devastating if infection is involved.

My friend Stavroula (OSU represent!) has indicated that it might be something else. Now, it's no secret that Athens is grossly polluted and breathing the air can be bad for you. But apparently, we've got more to worry about than just the Athenian air...the Evil Dust Cloud of Death coming in from the Sahara.

Dust cloud approaching Italy from Africa in 2005.



Dust cloud blankets Cyrpus in 2008.

Apparently the dust clouds rolling in off the Sahara reach Athens several times a year. It seems, in fact, that these dust clouds have quite an atmospheric impact, reducing rain and maybe even cutting down on the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic. Unfortunately, it seems that the dust clouds also carry pollution. For example, in 2000, a Saharan dust cloud brought radioative rain to Thessaloniki...radioactive as in straight-from-Chernobyl-style-radioactive.

I haven't heard anything in the news about a dust cloud in Athens, but according to another OSU representative, Dimitris, one of these very dust clouds is now in Crete, where the air is thick and opaque. I assume that this outbreak is a result of a dust cloud documented on March 1st down in Chad, which has since grown in size and moved our unfortunate direction.

Dust cloud in the Sahara, March 1st.

Huge dust cloud swirls over the Mediterranean yesterday, March 6th.

I was appalled to look out my window yesterday and see that Athens looked like this:

Athens in a Saharan dust cloud, April 2008.

So maybe this is the reason that I can't stop blowing my nose, and my head feels like a cotton plantation, and I can't hear anything out of one ear. I can blame the desert for all my woes.