#7 The On-Shore Breeze

The myth of San Francisco as a balmy beach town has largely been exploded, in no small part due to the oft-quoted adage that the coldest winter ever spent was a summer in San Francisco. The reality is more nuanced though - since absolute temperatures in San Francisco never dip very low. What really kills you is the on-shore breeze.

 

This is a lesser known fact since sea breezes are generally associated with vitality, beauty enhancement and a top-selling Mexican beer. Sea breezes connote a certain lifestyle aesthetic ("I'm on a boat mother f***er"!) that makes us happy: Dutch mills, girls in bikinis, expensive sea craft, waving palm trees, etc. AND provide that dramatic slow-motion montage effect we've seen a million times: a statuesque beauty backdrafted in an entryway, a sun-kissed blonde with sea-breezed bangs, and, giving us the vapors, a brash kid from steerage at the prow of an unsinkable ship.  

Sea breezes and humans, in other words, are usually on the same side, just a couple of laid back dudes working together on Corona commercial. Not so in San Francisco. As soon as temperatures heat up in the California valley, somewhere around mid-March and lasting until mid September, gales of cold coastal air sally forth like crazed Germans out of the trenches. 

Hostile air currents like this, especially since they do not abate in the evening, have a profound affect on a city's nightlife. A girl dolls up to the nines, checks herself in the mirror a thousand times and then the second she leaves her apartment gets air blasted. Her skin is chafed, her eyes water and, most saliently, her hair becomes a wind torn mess. All that time poofing and curling and straightening, wasted. She shows up at the bar or restaurant or theatre looking like Bruce Willis at the end of Die Hard.

 

Guy would not disqualify a girl for this. Errant locks, bruises, even raggedy clothing - guys have a super-ray vision that sees through this stuff. It's what makes them hit on girls at the gym.

 

But girls care about style and personality. They like having a certain aesthetic flair, a panache, and they like going to places that encourage those things. And if the process of achieving these things is frustrated or undermined, by, for example, inclement elements, then the incentive for a girl to present herself to the public for judgment is likewise undermined. Hence, the paucity of ladies out at night. It doesn’t help much to blame the wind of course, it’s not consciously undermining the single most compelling motivation for a guy’s continued existence, but what’s the alternative?