Burn On
The sky was raining ash as I handed a man a used snowboard with the silhouette of a naked woman holding a beer stein printed on it. He investigated the garish plank, bending it in the speckled orange light as I watched in silent indifference. After careful examination, he decided it was worth the $100 asking price and handed me a wad of twenties.
California is a wonderful place, isn’t it, folks? Not only could you, under ideal circumstances, visit the beach and the mountains on the same day, you could, two days into a natural disaster, drive from Santa Monica to East Hollywood and make a deal on a piece of misogynistic sporting equipment. I was grateful for the Santa Monican’s patronage. He didn’t even try to low ball me.
The fires that ended up burning 57,000 acres and killing 30 people were, at worst, an inconvenience for Megan Beth Koester. Sure, sourcing garbage to sell in the aftermath was difficult as everyone donated their primo trash to the victims, but my garage was already full from boom times. I considered, I attempted, to write about the fires as they flared, but to throw my hat into the ring of topical tragedy felt like stolen valor. If anyone has it worse than you, my brain tells me, say nothing. It’s just decorum.
Yes, there were microscopic cancers in the air, but when are there not? Our blood is already riddled with microplastics, a fact I love to constantly trot out to people who are already well aware. My crumbling rent-controlled apartment was not a fortress. Little stood between it and the soot. The $3.99 pleated polyester IKEA shade pinned into the window frame above my desk undulated with the rhythm of the air outside.
Anthony asked, as the sky rained ash, if we should leave. “This will be the rest of our lives,” I replied. He told me that wasn’t productive.
Escape felt like a luxury above our pay grade. Residents of Silver Lake and Los Feliz, dozens of miles away from the danger zones, decamped to the Central Coast, or the Bay Area, or Palm Springs; the nicer the hotel, the lower the vacancy rate.
But should we leave? I mean, there weren’t Hummers filled with National Guardsmen holding enormous guns going up and down the street like after Katrina, or standing outside the Third Street Promenade defending Nordstrom during the Covid lockdowns. The area had yet to become a police state. We stayed.
I glibly answered Anthony’s question because I didn’t know the actual answer. I still don’t. In an impotent attempt to feel agency during a catastrophe beyond my control, I downloaded an air quality app. Eventually, the air quality was downgraded to moderate, but the instruments couldn’t detect the ash; they weren’t programmed to look for the cancerous particulates flowing in and out of our lungs on account of the unprecedented environmental event.
I told him “This will be the rest of our lives” because the unprecedented has become antecedent. With each passing day, there seems to be some newer, fresher hell we are told we have to expend even more of our ever-dissipating mental energy on. But a confluence of unprecedence [sic] creates antecedence, does it not? From here on out, all horrors appear to be antecedent. Make a note of it.
Which is not to say I was unmoved by the horrors, impervious to the ash. Fear and uncertainty bred disassociation. The way in which it manifested itself was by having random Randy Newman lyrics loop in my head. I was on a Randy Newman kick, having recently checked his biography out from the library. While I found it poorly written and lacking in detail (Really? The only thing you want the public record to state about “Nilsson Sings Newman” is that Nilsson was on a lot of cocaine when he recorded it? OK, BOOMER), I was housebound and off-book prescribed an ADHD medication for depression that ended up giving me ADHD.
And so, I’d wake from restless sleep and endlessly repeat:
Lord, a plague is on the world
Lord, no man is free
The temples that we built to you
Are tumbling to the sea
While the Santa Monican had no qualms about buying a used snowboard, the idea of patronizing a restaurant in the midst of Dante’s Inferno felt wrong to me but January 8th was Sara’s birthday and we desired a semblance of normalcy. As we circled the block around El Coyote to find parking, we saw the fire on the hillside. It was unnervingly close. Still, we street parked, as I’d rather self immolate than pay valet.
A career waitress, the kind whose knees you know creak as she gets out of bed every morning but will never, can never, retire, stood on the corner in her campesina dress and dry lipstick and marveled at the flames. The news said such a thing was possible, she told us, but she didn’t believe it. A man sprinted across the parking lot. “You live up there?” she asked him. “YES!” he yelled and got in his car.
We quickly realized the flames were coming from Runyon Canyon, the park that sat directly across the street from my friend Howard’s apartment. “Dude, there’s a fire in Runyon?” I texted him. “I’m evacuating,” he replied.
I told him to come to our place. In the midst of the chaos, El Coyote continued to operate as usual, every booth filled with people patiently waiting for their red sauce and orange cheese. Nero fiddled as Rome burned. When Los Angeles burned, mariachis played.
Miiiiiiami
Blue day
Best dope in the world
And it's free
As we rushed home to meet our evacuee, we tuned to the left of the radio dial for information on the unfolding turmoil. Every couple of minutes, usually in the middle of an announcement about what regions should be evacuating, a voice dripping with the dulcet condescension of public radio came on to tell us that we were listening to continual coverage of the fires on LAist 89.3, which would be back in a moment. “Disney/Pixar asks you to consider ‘Inside Out: 2’ this awards season,” an advertisement would then inform us.
It served as a reminder that the future will not only entail desperately seeking topical information about safety via commodified media platforms, but the commodification of everything. As the unprecedented has now become antecedent, it is no longer beyond the realm of possibility to call 9-1-1 and get the message “Thank you for calling 9-1-1, presented by the limited series reboot of Michael Bay’s 2022 film ‘AmbuLAnce.’ If your emergency is violent in nature, please press one.” This will be the rest of our lives.
Side Note: In the same broadcast that kept breaking with announcements like “Amazon MGM Studios presents: ‘Nickel Boys’,” a newscaster recommended hugging a cop. I wouldn’t recommend this, as there’s no way they wouldn’t assume you were going for their gun.
Wind that once blew free
Now scatters dust to the sky
Cowboy, cowboy
Can't run, can't hide
Too late to fight now
Too tired to try
Once Howard got to my place, he sat on the couch, watching the local news with a weed pipe in his hand. We skipped from broadcast to broadcast; all played footage of the day before’s fires, albeit still burning, but not the freshest hell on the hillside. Which was not not news, but my evacuee would have liked something a little more topical, please and thank you. When KCAL finally cut to a newscaster standing directly outside Howard’s apartment building, he applauded. The Runyon fire was quickly extinguished; planes dropped water collected from the nearby Hollywood Reservoir every few minutes until the deed was done. The second the ground started to smolder, Howard returned home. The next time he came over, nearly a week later, his clothing still reeked of smoke.
President Coolidge come down in a railroad train
With a little fat man with a notepad in his hand
President say
"Little fat man, isn't it a shame
What the river has done to this poor cracker's land?"
Trump was, at the time, president-elect, and he reveled in California’s misfortune. While virtually no city’s infrastructure is set up to withstand the sheer amount of water required to fight a plurality of wildfires, he blamed the overtaxed hydrants on Governor Newscum [sic]’s inability to, uh…turn on a spigot. "They have a valve,” the soon-to-be leader of the free world told the press. “Think of a sink but multiply it by many thousands of times the size of it, it's massive. And you turn it back toward Los Angeles. Why aren't they doing it? They either have a death wish, they're stupid or there's something else going on that we don't understand."
In the pre-antecedent era, politicians at least pretended to have empathy. I thought about how, if NBC hadn’t canceled one man’s show, the Supreme Court wouldn’t have been given the ability to ruin generations. I wondered if We the People could file a class action lawsuit against the National Broadcasting Company.
Cabin fever coupled with a lack of desire to traverse through visible air led us to wander the halls of the Glendale Galleria, still open in spite of a rising death count. The usually bustling mall was eerily silent and almost devoid of life. Most stores were closed, with no signage bothering to state the obvious reason. It was like being in a casino on Christmas—only the most desperately addicted were still there to shop, their quivering hands clutching Zara bags. We were shocked to stumble upon a line of people outside a chain pizza restaurant; it turned out the restaurant was, in spite of it all, running a free pizza promo. The name of the restaurant was Blaze.
The river rose all day
The river rose all night
Some people got lost in the flood
Some people got away alright
As the days passed, a growing contingent of people in the flatlands, i.e. not in the fire’s direct path, began to fear the air. Because I am me and I am nothing if not a bitch, I saw fear of the air as a desire for counterfeit compassion practiced by those fortunate enough to not have their homes burn down but still desperate to make the tragedy their own. Now, I knew visible particulates in the air weren’t ideal, and I masked once I was able to pick up a box of expired N95s at Goodwill, but some took it to extremes.
Some said we shouldn’t wear shoes indoors; some said we should strip down and change our clothes as soon as we got in the house after being outside. I didn’t mean to be dismissive, but I couldn’t help but notice no one actually knew shit. The fear mongering disseminated via social media was washing your groceries during Covid-esque.
That was then but this is now, where I have had a sinus infection for months with no end in sight. When ten days worth of antibiotics didn’t work, I took six days of steroids; my throat, however, is still a conduit for phlegm. Pressure in my head ceaselessly attempts to push its way through my skull. I am perpetually exhausted, but I suppose it’s nice to have a doctor’s note. Will this be the rest of our lives?
Or should I say, will this be the rest of my life? How many years remain until it becomes impossible to extinguish the flames consuming us? Growing up like this has already begun to radicalize the younger generation, but it remains to be seen if there will be anything left to save when it’s their turn to run the remains of the world.
What are we gonna do,
Blow up the whole damn country?
I don’t know