A Return To Abnormal

My city is burning and it hurts my feelings.

Reader! I have missed you. After three long weeks of listening to “Can I Get a Chee Hoo?” from Moana 2 on repeat, I couldn’t wait to dump my kids off at school and resume my weekly meditations on whatever petty shit happens to be hurting my feelings. But then LA burst into flames. So last Wednesday morning, under a burnt (literally) umber sky, we packed up the KIA Niro and fled to San Diego. Back to full-time childcare. My feelings would have to wait.

I’m sure you’ve heard a lot of LA wildfire stories by now. Mine is nothing extraordinary. We fled because we got the evacuation order. We didn’t pack any priceless heirlooms, because we don’t have any. (I did grab my wedding band and engagement ring, which I generally don’t have on because compared to the rest of me, they seem “too nice to wear.” I’M A SLOB, OKAY?!!) When we left, I wondered if we would ever go back again. I texted a group of friends, all scattering to different corners of California that weren’t burning: Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, Encinitas. At one point, a friend from Altadena, one of the neighborhoods leveled by the fire, texted “our home is gone” and I thought maybe I would be sick. Instead, I squeezed out a few tears behind my sunglasses then pulled my shit together because there seemed to be nothing more important than not transmitting my fear to the two perceptive little boys in the back seat.

San Diego (like Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, Encinitas…) was surreal in its placidity. California is the hottest, craziest girl you know. Looking at her, you wonder, what combination of math and divinity created such a perfect specimen? Such bangin’ beaches? Such sublime skies? Then she bursts into flames, or shakes your home so violently the pictures fall off your walls, and suddenly you’re like, why did I fuck with this bitch? Why didn’t I move to Burlington, VT? Sure, it’s boring, but it’s also sturdy, dependable, doesn’t fly off the handle and destroy entire neighborhoods every time the wind blows the wrong way.

My kid at the beach. Not the scary one but still… look at those waves!

In San Diego, my husband was still bound by the daily grind. After all, the daily grind is DAILY. It doesn’t relent unless your laptop spontaneously combusts and even then maybe you could still work off your phone? So I took my kids to the beach alone. Because I didn’t do my research, I wound up at a spot that, if I’m being honest, was unfit for children. To get down to the one relatively “beach-ish” area, a small, somewhat populated cove, we had to scramble across slippery tide pools truncated by craggy cliffs and violent, churning waters. A place some might call “a death trap.” Even the well-mannered stoner who helped my sons and me off the rocks and onto the sand below gave me a wary look. You know shit’s gotten reckless when you’re being judged by a guy who doesn’t even own shoes. The waves were bigger than I expected, and it was clear that when the tide came in (and it was coming in), the beach would be entirely submerged. But there we were, my two little boys dying to play in the water, endlessly frustrated every time I yelled at them not to go in past their knees. I kept thinking, my husband would kill me if he saw this. What kind of idiot was I to tempt Mother Nature? Hadn’t she just run me out of my fucking home? Splashing in the waves, my boys looked so small. So breakable. How easily she could swallow them up and wipe out my everything. Don’t expect Mother Nature to be sentimental. To her, my boys were no more precious than a shell she grinds to sand or a piece of trash floating toward the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Mother Nature is stronger than you and she doesn’t care, I thought. I packed up my kids and drove them to a pizza shop.

That’s the challenge of it all, isn’t it? At the risk of sounding self-pitying, or oblivious to the collective damage we inflict, humans are weak and nothing is rooting for us. Yesterday, I read a piece written by a guy I worked with during the 2023 WGA strike. After everything he’s done for Hollywood writers, he’s kind of a folk hero in this town, endlessly giving, a guy you’d call honorable even though you never use the word, the last person who deserves to lose his home in a wildfire. But of course, no one does, and more importantly, the universe doesn’t care. Of the time between evacuating and learning his home was gone, he wrote, “Willful ignorance and wishful thinking have defined not just those 24 hours, but my life in Los Angeles.” I know what he means. The entertainment industry is contracting, there is little work to be had and fewer opportunities to break through if you haven’t already, and now our city is, not just metaphorically, but literally on fire. At what point does a person stop telling themselves, “A lot of people trying to make it here will fail. Almost everyone will fail. But I will not fail”? Because I know that believing things will work out won’t make it so. But not believing will ensure they don’t, right?

Still’s PH-272, 1950. Also kinda looks like LA right now.

From San Diego, I flew to Denver for a whirlwind 24 hours. My sister-in-law, an art historian, had curated an exhibition at The Clyfford Still Museum and Sunday was the last chance to see it before it closed. Another surreal place to be as LA continued to burn. If you haven’t heard of Clyfford Still, that’s because he was a huge asshole who refused to have his art shown alongside other renowned abstract expressionists of his time, and upon his death, insisted his work only be displayed in a museum devoted entirely to him. The result being, between 1980, the year he died, and 2011, when the museum opened, nobody saw his paintings, so nobody talked about him. But like an unfortunate number of huge assholes, Clyfford Still was also a great artist, who believed that the act of creating art WAS the art, that art critics were blowhards and famous contemporaries like Rothko and Newman were sellouts, and that “it’s intolerable to be stopped by a frame’s edge.” Kind of the perfect artist to immerse yourself in when you’re floundering, with little to no creative validation, wondering whether to keep going even though making art (if you can call unpolished sitcoms and intermittent newsletters art) is the only thing that makes you feel worthy and human and whole. He was also a terrible father whose children grew up neglected and resentful that his creative passions trumped their well-being. So…. there’s that to consider, too.

Like my friend (if I dare call him that), “willful ignorance and wishful thinking” define my life here in LA. But when my children’s happiness and safety hang in the balance, I have to ask myself, where am I placing this faith, what is fueling this hope, when I am being told over and over, as the work doesn’t come and the fires do, the universe doesn’t care? The best answer I can come up with is this: the hope is not in the universe. It’s in the art.