I'm Ready To Talk About The Fires
It’s taken me an entire month to finally decompress.
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In my first newsletter of the year, I romanticized about using 2025 to warp my life and fall in love and play footsie with the TBD man of my dreams under a table, on some moss covered patio, under some old oaks in Pasadena.
I wasn’t fully fantasizing, I was writing specifically about the Frederick Monhoff residence, the creaky-looking midcentury house whose patio I was describing. A house whose Airbnb reviews revealed it was, in fact, a guest house on a noisy lot whose main house was under a loud renovation, a major turnoff for me. I wasn’t looking to move in (a girl can dream), but was just hoping for a change of scene to decompress for a few days before I jumped into another large work project. That house and nearly 10,000 other homes around it are now gone.
The aptly named Canyon’s Edge house, whose deck looked out onto Eaton Canyon, the one I just about to settle on that Sunday night before Honey popped open her stitches and put my booking on hold, is also gone. We would’ve be in it on Tuesday night and driving for our lives out of the canyon like so many others. Ironically enough, I made the post-stitchfix decision to stay home and just get a long expensive massage somewhere local. By Tuesday morning, when the Palisades fire showed up on the news (still looking very containable), I instinctively cancelled my Wednesday appointment at Malibu’s Calamagos Ranch. Just to be safe. The 24 hour cancellation window was closing, and I already knew being up there with the winds that showed up Tuesday was a bad idea.
By that Tuesday evening, being outside was unbearable. Honey’s evening walk lasted all of 4 minutes. When we turned back to go home, I could see a faint trail of haze coming from the direction of Pasadena, barely noticeable against the dark sky, but just enough to blur out a section of stars. The Eaton fire had only been alive for a half hour then, and the smoke had barely blown over my neighborhood less than 10 miles away. It hadn’t yet broke into the Palisades-heavy news cycle and only had a few posts discussing it on Twitter.
Once I moved further east and Honey joined the family, my spare hours went to Pasadena. It is, in my opinion, the best place in Los Angeles to feel like you did something that weekend other than sit in traffic. Driving the 110 ‘til it dead-ends in Old Town, charging up at w/ an artichoke at Houston’s, preferring to run my errands and do my shopping in the walkable blocks there vs. The Grove or any other mall complex in the city. If I was making it into a moment — an excursion — I’d loop up through the oak trees, mansions, and old money, and head north toward the foothills, kill time at At Home, then Whole Foods, then loop back and call it a day.
On days where I had ambition and time, I’d start that trip in reverse. Exiting toward the foothills, specifically toward Altadena, to spend my morning following yard sale signs and curb-shopping for architecture and landscaping to add to my moodboards. Altadena easily is the best place to treasure hunt in the county, a credit to the neighborhood’s ability to maintain generations and their things.
My favorite find along the way was the guy who runs quarterly-ish estate and junk sales from the driveway behind that Lake Avenue comic book store. Sales are announced via text, or by a gigantic yellow “ESTATE SALE” sign taped to tailgate of a pickup truck parked on the street.
A collection of western desert geological maps from the 1930s and 1940s, from the office of Norman MacLean, then a professor. In his retirement years, MacLean would become an iconic figure of American literature with his novel A River Runs Through It and Other Stories. Over two days, I picked through hundreds of heavy maps to piece together places from my own western story — Joshua Tree, Death Valley, The Mojave, The Santa Rita Hills, Vegas, Lake Mead, and more.
I also picked up a single carved candlestick and spent another 30 minutes searching for her sister, because I hate to leave Black women behind. I found her sister a few months later at the next sale, a completely different carved form, yet, when paired together, perfectly the same height.
Anyway, all the homes whose yard sales I’d zigzag to on the weekend are gone. Though, the fires did, from what I can tell, stop just a few blocks shy of that cluttered Lake Avenue driveway.
I woke up to black skies that morning. No daylight, no pre-sunrise blue dawn, unless you looked miles to toward its edge. There, north toward Burbank, I could see blue skies in the inch between the smoke and the horizon.
This wasn’t that milky gray wildfire smoke you see coming off of plants and shrubs. It was black, like jet fuel. It was thousands of homes and dozens of lives burning out.
It was low, rolling over kind of like the Dementors in Harry Potter, but mostly like that video of a tanker ship cruising over a diver. That, except if it was at night. That kind of ominous moment where the propeller comes out of the shadows. It felt like being in an open field, or on a mountain, exposed and watching a thunderstorm form above you and waiting for lightning to strike. There was a palpable amount of weather within the smoke and barometric effects on my ears and senses that I could feel. A terrifying suspension of time, where the smell of the smoke didn’t exist and the growling sound coming from it wasn’t real. There was also generousness from Mother Nature who did let me form functional thoughts as I stood under it. The first thought was the expected reminder of just how small, how nothing, I am and we all are. The second thought was to get the fuck out of there. Lightning never struck, but I did run. First inside, then out to Palm Springs, and the longer I’ve had to think about it this month, I’ve decided I might run out of Los Angeles for good.
We can talk about “extreme weather events” all we want, but this city's always been one large earthquake away from burning to the ground. Millions of residences tied together by antiquated gas lines and unreachable shut-off valves. We were always going to burn. The surprise is not that we did, but that there was no plan to stop it.
LA is a city that’s too corrupt to be prepared for anything. Really. You saw it play out live on air as the fires were only hours old. The fire chief blaming the mayor. Firefighters blaming the equipment. Someone I can’t remember blaming LADWP. Random rich girls blaming drug addicts. Failed mayoral candidate and billionaire demon Rick Caruso politicking to any camera crew that would have him, as his neighbors and their pets and their houses are literally on fire.
There was an immediate city-wide rush to blame and subsequently target unhoused people for starting these fires. And no atonement despite Southern California Edison (Eaton) and some rich person’s unnamed son (Palisades) most likely being the correct targets to place the blame. At a time where most of the humans in the city should feel things like sadness, fear, sympathy, and, in the immediate, be more concerned about loss of life, you saw the soulless ghouls of Civic L.A, who spend all day politicking and infighting and not doing their jobs or really anything beneficial for us residents, doing what they do. Sigh.
You also got to see just how complicit the media is as they stood behind the LAPD, the #1 vampire of all of our civic budgets, the only department that never gets a budget cut, and, in fact, gets hundreds of millions added to their budget every year at the expense of us. The media’s willingness to spread immediate lies about looting to give an otherwise useless LAPD some purpose. Fearmongering to help the LAPD prove their value, even if it means inadvertently (edit: intentionally) urging people say behind in deadly evacuation zones to “defend their homes.” The same media that stages the incoming Santa Anas as porno-for-pyros every fucking Fall.
Anyway, remember, cops can’t shoot fires, and, you know, no looter is rushing into a fire zone with sieve to sift ash for pinky rings and melted car parts. And no one whose house is still standing would give one single fuck that their glitchy Samsung TV was stolen.
The LAPD could relinquish $15M of its $4B budget to the fire dept if they wanted to.
They could also shave some off for Animal Services and every other underfunded department on the verge of collapse.
Rick Caruso could’ve held a booster fundraiser for them or wrote a check personally. He gives USC almost twice that annually.
But again, a budget cut wasn’t an issue until it was propagandable.
Next year’s fire department budgets are secured I guess. Maybe more planes? I don’t know. Top Gun-esque edits of white men with good hairlines dropping fire retardant on the browns hills of the county looks cool, sure, but all the houses still burned the fuck down.
And, we’re still dependent on black and brown prison slaves.
What else. Oh, yeah. Gavin Newsom. If it’s not obvious, he spends most of his off-camera time, especially when it comes to Los Angeles, having to referee the nonstop inter-agency fighting. That encampment parade from a few months ago was his way of taking credit for a task City Council simply couldn’t do, despite years of him and Biden handing them emergency funding and blank checks to “solve” homelessness in the city. The money, of course, disappeared without a paper tail into city council’s pockets while conditions worsened and renter protections evaporated. Just yesterday, L.A. City Council voted against a motion that would’ve froze rents and barred landlords from raising them for one year post-fire.
This rant will be done after I remind you how absolutelyyyyy insane it was to watch all the eager Angelenos who definitely drove past sidewalks full of abjectly homeless people to get their #good_deed credit for donating their closet to the newly homeless fire victims. Some were not happy about seeing regular poor people at donation sites!
Imagine if the people in this city could just be normal every other day of the year. Normal, or outraged. I’d take either at this point. It’d be heaven and I’d probably stay.
We also have an environmental crisis that, in a normal world, would be treated more like two large trains carrying hazardous chemicals derailed and burned for days. The snowflake sized ash, the black soot covering our homes and sidewalks, the charred leaves and full-sizes pages that sprinkled down miles across the city. All blown around by wind, cars, and leaf blowers until, I guess, the rain finally showed up and magically cleaned it all away.
The chemicals aren’t considered in our weather, water, or air quality reports, and the EPA’s true transparency on what is now in our collective air, soil, and coating our homes and tongues has yet to be seen. But hey, here’s a concert!
The story excluded from most mainstream news is an explanation of just exactly where the toxic debris is being cleared to. If you guessed that they tried to drop some of it off into another less wealthy region of the county, you guessed right…
Anyway, long story short, I think this is finally enough to make me leave L.A.
You haven’t seen me lately because I’ve decided to (probably, maybe, most likely) buy a house somewhere far outside of the city. I had to go offline to really sit with my thoughts to confirm that I wasn’t suddenly manic (literally no history but you never know), or in the midst of some other breakdown. I sat for a month, did the math, considered the debt of the next 15 or 30 years of my life. Got a mortgage pre-approved. With heinous interest rates. Worked through every worst-case scenario of what life outside of apartment living could look like, from broken plumbing pipes to home invasions.
I did think about where else I’d want to live in this city now that Pasadena and Altadena, the last places I liked in L.A., were off the list. In fact, everything I’ve really loved about L.A. is gone. If I’m being honest, it was already going before the pandemic. It was gone when Smog Cutter closed. But I stayed, created a routine looping through the same restaurants, bars, and shops, until one by one, they all closed too. Nothing better or more permanent showed up to replace them. The noticeable pulse of the population is missing. That’s expected, though, in a city where every dime goes to cops, every vote goes to landlords, and year over year another grifting developer ring gets billions in credits to “revitalize” a collapsed neighborhood that would’ve been better served if the city maintained its streets, protected its residents, and didn’t force their migration with rent hike after hike.
But I digress. Maybe I’ll come back in five years and save the city. Maybe I won’t actually leave. Let’s revisit this in six months.
I left Altadena 4 years ago, after the last big fires, knowing in my heart that LA is just not sustainable. As I watched the Eaton fire burn, and frantically checked in on friends and family, I experienced such a huge wave of relief that I had left, and horrible survivor's guilt that I wasn't there to help. I'm in Oregon now (Honey would love it, so much open space, no people!) and I never want to go back, but I will never really escape the feeling that LA is superior in every way, even in its brokenness.
I really appreciate your thoughts. I'm sorry for the specific heartache of not just the literal loss of the city but the proverbial and spiritual severing that has happened. I watched the TT you linked about the unhappy people helping the poor. It made my stomach turn... Even in the midst of a catastrophic event, the dehumanizing of houseless people remains a thru line. It truly makes me sick.
I hope you find a peaceful place for you and Honey to call home.