California

In the past two days, fires in and around LA County have destroyed 27,000 acres and counting — sometimes as fast as three football fields every minute. It's an astonishing amount of land to go in such a short time. More than 130,000 lives uprooted. People left with nothing.

My thoughts are with friends in Pacific Palisades, Woodland Hills, Santa Monica, Studio City, Beachwood Canyon, and Lake Hollywood, which are currently on fire or bordering neighborhoods that are burning.

I haven't been to California since 2019, but I've lived in all of those places, sometimes for weeks, sometimes for months. I lived in Santa Monica for almost a year... spread over a decade. I know a lot of good people who call those cities and neighborhoods home.

In 2017, I lived on the Beverly Glen-Bel Air border when the Skirball Fire decimated Bel Air, burning 422 acres. It was a terrifying and clarifying place to be.

The next year, I was talking with my friend, Artur, who was bartending at the Fairmont Miramar in Santa Monica, when a Malibu resident just displaced by the Woolsey Fire sat next to me. He wore cut-off jeans, flip flops, and a ratty t-shirt, his face and hair grey with soot. "I just ran," he said. His house was gone, his car. He asked to borrow my phone and then just stared at it, realizing he didn't know anyone's number. "Do you have your wallet?" I asked. He nodded and realized why I was asking. He asked Artur about vacancies. So many people were fleeing, it was possible every room was taken — if you looked north over the hotel pool, you could see the smoke above Malibu, which lies just beyond Pacific Palisades. It was that close. Artur picked up the bar phone and within a few seconds was giving the man a thumb's up. The man looked at my drink and asked what it was. "A Two-Legged Dog," I said and motioned for Artur to fix him one, but the man signalled for him to stop. "Just water," he said. "Lots of water."

A few days earlier, I'd accepted an invitation to stay at a friend's loft in DTLA. I wished the stranger luck, said goodbye to Artur, and headed to the Expo. I was at the loft in a little over an hour. My friend had completely forgotten about the invitation and was packed to head north for a few days, along with a mutual friend, documentarian Nirvan Mullick. They were going to document the Camp Fire in Paradise and asked if I'd help. I knew in my bones I couldn't again be close to that kind of devastation. I declined.

Be safe, California friends.

A few bonus reads:

I Saw the Beginning of Hell by Lucy Sheriff (Intelligencer, January 8, 2025)

A Running List of Resources to Help Artists Impacted by LA Fires

Los Angeles Fire Season Is Beginning Again. And It Will Never End by David Wallace-Wells (Intelligencer, May, 2019)

The Case for Letting Malibu Burn by Mike Davis, from his book, Ecology of Fear, 1998. Davis was also the author of City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles and other fantastic books.

I found this story rather interesting. In the 80s, gangs of vandals were paid by an upholstery company to slash the seats on BART (San Francisco's rapid transit). The vandals had signature slashes so the company knew who to pay. This went on for years, with the contract price growing every year.

The little-told story about the BART seat-slashing gang that was part of an upholstery racket

Here’s the outlandish story of how a BART contractor was arrested on felony vandalism and…

SFGATEDianne de Guzman

Dude built a Beach House inside a box truck so that he can live on the sand in Orange County, California. Great design. Love this sort of thing.

Years ago, I had a small stroke that caused me to reevaluate what I was doing with my life and with my work. Invitations to my next birthday party went out with a photo and readings of two poems, one by James Wright and one by David Whyte.

In the years since, a number of the guests to that party have told me how much they enjoyed the poems. Here they are, along with the photo:

Robert Pattinson reads a poem by James Wright

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Everything Is Waiting for You written and read by David Whyte

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I’d taken the photo post-stroke, while bathing in a client’s bathtub in Beverly Glen, her dog Bailey watching from the sidelines. For some reason, the framing of it reminded me of Alex Colville's work, so I later tinted it in his style.

Outside that bathroom, not far away, the Skirball Fire was having its way with Bel Air, the neighborhood that was literally across the street from where I was staying. I'd spent the morning feeding the chickens and cats and walking the dogs as ash fell from the sky. I'd become consumed by chaos and worry about when it would be our time to evacuate the neighborhood. (If everyone flees simultaneously, no one gets anywhere, so you wait until instructed.)

My client was incommunicado, so I'd taken it upon myself to load her SUV with what I assumed were her prized possessions, leaving just enough room for me and the pets. Thankfully, on the morning when the street's more experienced residents had predicted we'd have to leave, the wind changed and we were able to stay put. Though the fire continued to blaze, the flames never crossed that street; the ash never returned. I drew a bath to celebrate and re-center myself.

Unpredictably, with a glowing reference from that Beverly Glen client (neighbors conveyed my preparedness, which they witnessed through their windows), I started getting job offers from people living in danger zones with their pets. A year later I got calls from a couple in Malibu, and would have accepted the gig had I not already been booked in Santa Monica. While there, the Woolsey Fire scorched that beach-side town. I heard numerous horror stories from fleeing residents who'd moved into the Santa Monica Fairmont Miramar, where I'm a regular at the main bar. They literally had nothing left but the clothes on their backs. Then, I booked a 4+ month gig in Vanuatu during cyclone season which I completed without incident. Less than a month after I left, Cyclone Harold ripped through much of the South Pacific archipelago, including the property I'd been living on, sparing my clients and their staff and their buildings — which had been built to withstand cyclones — but laying waste to much of the greenery.

Today, I'm reminded of this bathroom photo and these poems and that birthday invitation, because someone shared The Poetry Atlas on Metafilter and used the Wright poem as an example. Want to know, exactly, where the hammock swings that the narrator is wasting their life in? The Poetry Atlas will tell you.

The second poem is by David Whyte, who's written and spoken many wonderful things. If you appreciated the line, "Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity," you will enjoy his book, Consolations, which has many such pieces of wisdom. One of my favourites is "Beauty is the harvest of presence."

(In my mind, I always link that line to one by Tom Stoppard: "Life's bounty is in its flow, later is too late." Perhaps you also have lines or definitions that are forever-conflated? Do I digress? So be it. I digress.)

In What to Remember When Waking, Whyte tells the story of an ancient Irish tribe who no longer wish to fight — he describes them as "no longer wanting to have that conversation." So, when next they're confronted with battle, "they turn sideways into the light and disappear into the originality of it all."

Considering the "conversations" we're having, and reflecting on whether they're helping us be the person we want to be, living the life we want to live, can lead to some of life's great awakenings. Am I wasting my life in the right way?

After that stroke, I sold Good Music, my Toronto record shop, to a competitor, and made a promise to myself that I would no longer do things solely for money. I no longer wanted to have that conversation. Rather, I wanted to live a time-rich life. If that doesn't sound easy, I can assure you that it's absolutely harder than it sounds — for the most part, I've managed to do that while living in some interesting places, despite threats of fire, cyclone, or comfortable hammock.