The atmosphere outside my home is best described as “movie scene set in Mexico;” there is a sickly yellow pallor over everything, with a hazy sky hiding the diffuse ball of the sun. The air here is not fit to breathe, and it smells like other people’s tragedies. The smoke from the massive and out of control Eaton Fire in Pasadena passes overhead, creating a weird demarcation line - when I look to the west I can see blue sky with a stratified layer of thick brown above, like the sections on a Rocket Pop from hell.
To live in Los Angeles is to live with a back-of-your-brain knowledge that disaster can come at any time. We all make our ways through our lives knowing that eventually, inevitably, a huge earthquake is going to hit and the outcome will be catastrophic beyond our imagining. It’s a weird aspect of being here, this never fully internalized understanding the very ground beneath your feet might liquify and the solid structures around you could become a tomb, and with absolutely no notice at all.
Fire, on the other hand, is a regular occurrence. There are fires every year, and it’s part of the local ecosystem, although too often the fires are started by human action. This is an area that was made to burn. The fires are usually in that vague place known as “elsewhere,” some other town over the horizon. Perhaps close enough that you might get some of the smoke, maybe even in the most extreme circumstances some ash could fall on your car, but always elsewhere.
The fires we are experiencing now are everywhere. Multiple fires burn across the city, each independent but all part of an overarching climate emergency that we have ignored in much the same way we ignore the imminent Big One. What feels uniquely bizarre about these fires, besides the fact that there are so many of them and they are so big, is that they’re encroaching on neighborhoods that never burned like this before. The fires are not content to stay in the mountains around the city this time, they’ve decided they want to come in closer and closer to where all the people are.
My best friend and her family evacuated last night. Winds gusted at a 100 mph near her home, and the bright red luciferian flames lit the night sky, licking at the stars just a couple of miles away. Her home was in a “get ready” evac zone - have your shit packed, if you are disabled or have pets maybe get out immediately - and it was briefly in a mandatory evacuation zone, but now they’ve dialed it back to get ready. Her family spent the night at a friends’; today they have returned home to document their belongings and to wet down their house and the land around it, a hail mary attempt to give the floating orange embers no place to find purchase. Will it help? I guess we will know in a day or two.
There are evacuation areas just north of me. They’re far enough away, and with enough urban area in between that I feel somewhat safe, but then again yesterday afternoon when the Eaton fire started I told my friend that it would be a historic catastrophe if the fire made it all the way down to her house, and look where we are now. What’s happening in the Pacific Palisades is even worse, more destructive, more horrifying, but then again in these situations we have horror enough to go around.
We’re living in exactly the historic catastrophe at which I scoffed less than 24 hours ago, but I should have known better. The 21st century has been a steady parade of historic catastrophes, and the craziest part is that we’re just getting started. I’ve lived through my share - I feel like 9/11 was enough for me, no more terrible tragedies please - and I know that as middle age turns into old age I’ll be living through well more than my share. Well more than what should be anybody’s share.
We live on an Earth that is trying to shake us off her back, and we are ruled by people who see this solely as an opportunity for profit. I’ve never understood this perspective; the short-sightedness of it is gob-smacking. Look, I’ve definitely made terrible choices that would benefit me in the short term and harm me in the long, but I did my best to make sure none of those choices would simply terminate the very idea of having a long term. What will that money be spent on? Why would anyone want to be the richest man in the rubble?
At this point it’s not even clear what is to be done. I watch and smell this city burn and wonder how long before the flames reach me, or how long before the water runs out and you just simply can’t live here anymore or how long until the earth opens up and swallows us whole. Wherever you live the questions are essentially the same - when will the hurricane wash away your home, when will the tornadoes destroy everything you have, when will the land dry up or when will the waters rise above your head? We don’t know when, but we have a sense it’s coming. More than a sense.
When I began writing on this Patreon I was a big consumer of self help platitudes. The truth is that most of them are correct, it’s just that you need to be in the right headspace to actually make use of them. That’s a rather rare headspace; a lot of people think they’re in it but they’re actually trucking in denial and evasion, using the self help in ways that do not help whatsoever. Still, the basics remain the basics, and as I look at the ominous skies and know it’s time to get used to them, I am reminded of the most basic of them all:
Be good to each other. Be kind. The world is a disaster, and it is unlikely to improve at any point in the near future. We all suffer and we all are afraid, so why would we want to make it worse for anyone else if we don’t have to? Our suffering and fear is not lessened by being cruel or nasty to one another; if this worked the most horrible people alive would be at peace right now.
Maybe there are big things we can do as the breakdown occurs - volunteering, protest, revolution - but in the meantime, and in the days in between those things, we should just try to be good to one another. Just don’t make it worse.
This is beautiful, thank you. (I’m in Westwood.)