The Part That's Doing Me In
Postcard from Los Angeles
I know there are other things going on in the world aside from these wildfires, I understand how this works. When you are right up against an unthinkable disaster big enough to make the world news, you’re only going to be in the news cycle at the top of the hour for a week, maybe two. As long as people keep tuning in, clicking - as long as billionaires can profit from your suffering, basically. After that, life will go on for everyone else, and you will be there living the long term recovery.
It’s the same when someone dies. There’s an outpouring of love, people call, they start a meal train if you’re lucky, maybe your best friend comes and does your laundry or something - I wouldn’t know because my mom died during the pandemic so no one could come, and we had to have her memorial over zoom, and my dad died out here with me in California and he didn’t want a funeral - but whatever, people show up in the beginning and they send cards and texts and check in to make sure you’re okay. Then after a while they go back to their lives, because of course they should. Then a while after that they start asking if you’re feeling better yet, because your grief becomes inconvenient or uncomfortable or a drag, even over the phone.
I guess the other thing that’s different between a world disaster and the death of a loved one is there aren’t billionaires in the mix making money unless your uncle is Jeffrey Bezos, and in that case, I wonder if he shows up at the funeral at all. Maybe he just has his assistant overnight-prime a floral arrangement and sign a condolence card on his behalf, or a really nice gift basket shows up at the church entrance as you sit in the pew, listening to the eulogy. You get a text on your phone as you’re weeping, with a picture of the basket sitting there askew, and an email alert, asking you to rate your delivery experience. Meanwhile, Uncle Jeff flies overhead in his penis-shaped rocket, polluting the skies but not donating a single cent to disaster relief anywhere, certainly not to California.
When someone in your life dies, usually your neighbors from other parts of the country don’t tell you to go fuck yourself, say it’s your fault, and laugh while you cry. But other than that, it’s kind of the same.
I still have photo albums packed in my car, and passports in my purse, but I don’t think we’ll need to evacuate. Unlike so many of my friends - some of them very close friends who no longer have a house - I think our house is safe. It is hard to relax, though, and still very hard to sleep. Last night there were helicopters overhead for hours, I don’t know why. I’ve checked the Watch Duty app so many times this last week, and there weren’t any alerts going off, so I assumed it was something relatively benign, whatever that even is anymore.
I don’t know if it’s cortisol levels or having a kid in the house, if it’s the new and horrible wind warnings, or the fact that “18% contained” just doesn’t sound as high as one would like after a week, all I know is I don’t really sleep. I just lie there in the bed until about 4am, and then I lightly doze off and on for three hours. Get up, go through the day and do it again. It has to change soon, maybe tonight. And yes, I’ve done everything. Meditation, yoga nidra, 4-7-8 breathing, legs-up-the-wall. I actively try not to think about the horrible comments I’ve seen on the internet on any given day - sometimes that is a meditation in itself.
Instead I focus on the texts I’ve received from friends and family, or the way the entire Los Angeles community has come together, and quickly, too. I think about my friends who didn’t have time to pack anything at all, my friend who lost the engagement ring her husband saved up for that she doesn’t wear every day, or their baby’s first shoes, or the only photos she had of her mother. Sometimes tears just spill out of my eyes, I don’t bother wiping them away anymore. I think about the firefighters, and assume the ones I met at my house a few months ago have been fighting relentlessly for days.
Today I drove by the firehouse in my neighborhood and decided I’m going to drop something off for them this week. I don’t know what yet. Maybe I’ll call and ask, maybe I’ll just show up with something. Giant boxes of doughnuts and a heartfelt thank you card? What do you give people who literally put their lives on the line to save you, your family, your friends, your city? Doughnuts feel insane, but so does everything else.
The thing is, I’m exhausted and I might be sick. I’m not sure because the air quality is terrible and there’s ash everywhere, so the burning in my throat and chest could be that, along with the tired feeling behind my eyes. That part could just be the lack of sleep, too. I’m also really down, which is not like me - anyone who knows me would tell you that. I’ll bounce back, I don’t need anyone to tell me to breathe, or to be grateful. I am. It hurts to see your friends post gofundmes knowing they are the exact people who hate to ask for help and never would, just like you, and it hurts because donating and sharing and helping in any way you can is the easiest and best thing there is to do.
It hurts a little extra because these are the same people you would call if you absolutely needed to call someone, because they would say yes without hesitation, they would come in the middle of the night, they would share whatever they had, and now they don’t have anything but each other. That’s a lot of course, but it’s still really hard to start over. It’s easy to say it’s “just stuff” but I encourage anyone thinking that to leave your house right now with nothing but what you have on your back. Just walk out the door, and walk down the block, and imagine everything behind you is gone.
When a friend asked if I wanted to participate in a clothing drive Saturday and help to promote it, I couldn’t say yes fast enough, because waiting in the house to see whether the evacuation warning near us was going to turn into a mandatory order can only go on so long. After I hit publish, I’m going to volunteer with baby2baby packing up diapers and formula, clothes, linens and hygiene products to be delivered to displaced families all over Los Angeles.
By next week, the wildfires will probably be the third story down, maybe the fourth, but the work here to recover is going to be months and years long. People think Los Angeles is full of millionaires and celebrities, and there are some, it’s Hollywood, but that is not the large majority of people out here, and I seriously challenge you to find a group of people who instantly come together to help each other this way. The only other time I’ve seen this was in New York City on 9/11 and in the weeks and months after. Maybe disasters always bring out the best in people, I have a feeling that’s the case, but not online, not when you’re in California.
I wish it didn’t matter. I wish I didn’t care what people said under the video of Casey Colvin when it gets posted - and it has been posted a lot because it is incredible, and seriously the only truly happy thing I’ve seen in days and days - but I do. It fills me with rage and despair when ignorant, heartless people leave comments asking how he could have left his dog in the first place. Um, because he didn’t know there was going to be a raging wildfire? Because he left for work at 7am, and the Palisades fire broke out just before 10:30am? He spent five hours desperately fighting traffic and blockades to try to get back to his dogs, finally got to the bottom of his hill, and was told by police he could not enter the area.
There is a video of him breaking down and begging them to help him. There’s a reporter there, Liz Kreutz, covering the fire, and she talks to him. You can see how desperate he is, the man is literally pulling his hair out and crying, you can hear the anguish in his voice. It broke me. It broke Kreutz, too, because she went and found a firefighter who was able to go and rescue one of Casey’s two dogs, but the other one - Oreo - had run away in fear. Dogs do that during fires sometimes, so do cats. So Casey spent five days thinking the worst. No one in areas where homes have burned to the ground has been let back in until these last couple of days, and even then, it’s only with an escort - a police officer has to go with you for your own safety because everything is still smoldering and unstable.
You can maybe imagine it isn’t safe. The infrastructure is gone. If I showed you the video of my friend’s house, of his entire block in the Palisades, you’d understand right away, but I’m not going to do that, because I shouldn’t have to, right? We should all have compassion for people when unthinkable things happen, and everyone has seen it on the news, anyway. But people don’t stop there, the comments are terrible and full of judgment. I’d never leave my dogs behind, there’s a special place in hell for someone who would do that. He doesn’t deserve that dog. My dogs are like my children, how could he have left him?
I have not been able to help myself, a number of times I have defended Casey, and it isn’t just him. It’s anywhere anyone posts videos of firefighters saving dogs. People attack. They assume the worst, knowing nothing, and a little bit of the rubber band that is my nervous system stretches and frays that much more. People who have lost everything should not have to defend themselves right now, so I will defend them. But it’s devastating that it needs to be said, and it is testing my faith in the basic human decency of too many people.
Have you seen the politicians (public servants) suggesting that federal aid to California ought to be conditional? Do you know that California pays far more in federal taxes than it receives in benefits? Just in case that isn’t super clear, that means California contributes a lot more money to the collective United States “pot” than it takes each year, and we are one of the few states where that is true. What that means is when other states - states like Louisiana, where Mike Johnson is from - have natural disasters and need federal aid, some of the money the federal government has to offer is coming from California. Can you imagine how you would have felt during Hurricane Katrina, when people lost everything and were standing on rooftops praying to be saved - can you imagine if Democrats suggested Louisiana should only receive aid under certain conditions? Like if they decided to adopt more liberal policies, then maybe the government would help them?
I have been avoiding the news very carefully, except to read what I need to know. I don’t want to hear these awful men saying obscene things right now. I do not have the elasticity to bounce back and I am one of the bounce-backiest people I know in normal times, but not today because I am hurting and tired and scared and sad and trying my best to help my friends and also people I don’t know who have lost everything. Even when you try to avoid hearing this stuff, you sign onto a platform owned by another billionaire who has yet to contribute one red cent to the state where he made, and continues to make his fortune (hello Zuck, how’s Silicon Valley?) so that you can post some links to places where they are giving away clothing to displaced families, and you hear things you wish you hadn’t heard.
Smug, nasty, little men who pretend to care about family values but usher in Pete Hegseth, because they also cheat on their wives and lie to your face - and they want California to kneel for aid, to kiss the ring and be less woke. They say this immoral, unthinkable, unpatriotic garbage while the state is burning. Fuck. You. All. Maybe California should withhold federal taxes this year if aid is withheld, how about that? Why is that any more outrageous than what you are threatening, you awful, nasty, godless, soulless, compassionless, heartless, tiny little men. No question mark because I don’t have time or energy or the interest to wait for your answers. What is ironic though, is that it is only a matter of time before the people in the states these men represent are going to need the federal tax contributions from the state of California to face their own natural disasters. That’s the way the world is now, that’s the way we’ve made it. I can guarantee you what we won’t do is laugh while they suffer.
I think it’s pretty obvious the economic trickle-down theory does not work, but you know what does trickle down? Hatred. It’s horrible. I have never seen a president-elect hurl childish, schoolyard insults at the governor of a state while he is on the ground battling a natural disaster, multiple tornadoes of fire the likes of which we have never experienced, and I’ll never understand why anyone wanted this person back in power. The people who are being nasty on the internet are the people who voted for the men who don’t believe in climate change. They want to blame Los Angeles and its woke policies and DEI hires, they want to point fingers at all the rich people who lost their mansions, or pretend it’s homeless people committing arson. They are the living, breathing, embodied version of blame the victim and it’s the ugliest and scariest thing I’ve seen yet. It makes it hard to breathe and it’s not just the air out here.
Maybe I’d feel bad for you, but you’ll just buy a new mansion next week. There are so many hard-working people in Los Angeles whose apartment buildings burnt down. People who have families and houses passed down to them through generations, who have now lost everything. There are people saying California is being punished by God, but I laugh at that, because a person who thinks that way must profess to be Christian, but what kind of Christian laughs when people suffer?
I had a crazy thought somewhere along the way, probably sleep-deprived and cortisol-drenched, probably sadder than I’ve been in a very long time, but the thought was - maybe this is what we’re going to do. Maybe we’re going to elect the most horrific men who consume everything and care about no one - not the people who voted for them or the people who railed against them. Men who are going to build rockets and the dumbest looking trucks I’ve ever seen in my life. Men who are going to create social media apps to rate girls by how hot they are and eventually make us all hate each other, and other men who will buy up newspapers to keep us enraged and distracted and pointing fingers and screaming into the abyss - while they accrue more and more and ever more. Meanwhile we will be satisfied with our incessant air conditioning on not very hot days, our latest Amazon purchases and our new iPhones. Wars will continue, people will keep screaming on the internet, natural disasters will get worse.
Then one day the grid will collapse and the phones will go dead in our hands. We’ll look up and the entire planet will be rubble and burning embers, and if we're lucky, maybe a little grass and some trees will survive, along with the oceans and rivers and streams. The sun and the moon and the stars will still be up in the sky.
And we’ll have to start again, those of us who don’t perish. We’ll have to learn how to make shelter and live off the land and read the stars to figure out if a storm is coming. We’ll have to work together to make sure there’s enough food for everyone to eat, and enough wood for everyone to stay warm. We’ll have to think about more than what is convenient, fast, comfortable and shiny. I mean it would be great if we didn’t have to wait for that to happen in order to be kind to one another, but my hope is hanging by a thread.
Because I’ll tell you what. As grief stricken as I am for people who lost their houses and communities this week, their schools and synagogues, their coffee houses and grocery stores, their favorite restaurants and the bench on the bluff where they had their first kiss … I’m a lot more worried for people who’ve lost their humanity. That’s the part that’s doing me in.
Friends, I am, admittedly, a pretty fragile version of myself right now, but if you want to meet me live to talk about basic human decency and compassion, I’ll be here 1/17/25 at 11:15am PST, or you can wait for the Come As You Are podcast version which will go out Saturday as usual. I linked baby2baby and my dear friends’ gofundme above, but if you are looking for other organizations doing good work on the ground in Los Angeles, there’s the LAFD Foundation, World Central Kitchen and Pasadena Humane Society to name a few more. I am sending love to you all. I’ll meet you in the comments section soon. Appreciate you so much x
Truth! Preach! I’m in the San Fernando Valley and saw the fire come over the ridge toward Encino. Packed to evacuate. No electricity for days. And thankfully, you and I are still standing, we still have a voice… we can still speak for others.
oh, and I’m with you: withhold federal tax payouts if you-know-who f*cks with us. We’re the fifth largest economy in the world, let’s act like it. They need us more than we need them! Just sayin…
Former firefighter here to say your gratitude is enough. Those signs saying, “Thank you firefighters!” buoyed my spirits and kept me going through many long shifts and long seasons. We got criticized and attacked on a pretty frequent basis, too, and every word of kindness and thanks was a powerful antidote.