Thunder outside, raindrops that leave an inch-wide mark on my T-shirt as I ride in out of its fringes, hail bouncing off the window, cars already leaving wakes like speedboats on Bornholmer Str. outside. But it’s nothing compared to yesterday, when the sky turned an ugly orange-red in the west, and then black, and then out of nowhere wind stronger than I’ve felt anytime in the last year here, the storm that blew apart the Hauptbahnhof included. You could see the rain coming in sideways before it hit, a weird curtain just a hundred yards away that didn’t seem to be dropping like ordinary precipitation. And then the hammer (Tornado! calls Bowlserised), lights in the sky, you can see why Thor was such a thing. Or Odin. Anyone with lightning.

In San Francisco, all we had were gods of summer fog, which doesn’t make for fear or propitiation, which in turn may explain a few things about the city.