Graven Images

A fireplace without a mantlepiece isn't that unusual in Southern California residential architecture. A fireplace isn't a place for gathering or memories here. It doesn't draw the eye, the mind or the body to the sanctuary space for the offerings meant to fight back winter in the timeless war between humans and the murdering, blood-thickening cold. Stripped of its existential underpinnings (or even spatial logic), a SoCal fireplace is a sad, vestigial thing. It's an afterthought, an affectation, a lie house-selling-realtors agree to tell and house buyers agree to believe, like second-story master bedroom balconies; it's something to go "ooh" at when listing a home's features, but we all know nobody will ever use. It's a dinky, unwavering, hissing gas-fed blue flame warming up faux logs fixed in place and fashioned out of concrete, ultimately making no difference in the temperature of the room and lasting exactly until you crank the switch to OFF. There's no varying flame to hypnotize into reflection, no smell of dying young pine to change the tenor of the room, no occasional pyrocastic pop of superheated sap to remind you of the creative/destructive power at the heart of every star or the potential to set the carpet alight. It's an appendix scar. It's nipples on a man.

A Southern California fireplace doesn't deserve a mantlepiece. It's unworthy of the dignity suggested by being a resting a place for the urn containing grandpa's ashes or selections from your Precious Moments Coquettish Clowns figurine collection.

I suppose I shouldn't say our fireplaces get no use at all. If you haven't already buried it behind a bookcase or a computer desk, it's as good a backdrop as any for your Christmas tree positioning. It's a nice, suggestive mise en scène for any picture of the tree you want to post on Instragram, evocative of a larger narrative that doesn't exist. It's the same way Playboy likes to use farmhouse settings for centerfold shoots.

The inclusion of a fireplace isn't unforgivable, of course. We just don't know what else to do. The most essential elements of the home for comfort and survival out here lack the intimate charm or ancient pre-human mystique of the fireplace. There's a reason the air conditioning unit is located outside. It's cacophonous and shuddering, exuding exactly as much romance as any other electro-mechanical appliance costing thousands of dollars per year to operate. It reeks of ozone and fried dust, pumping out into the localized area via its massive exhaust fan the exact opposite of what it is meant to provide through the ducting inside: a fucking shit-ton of hot-ass air. You can put a mantlepiece over that if you want to, but anything lighter than a bowling trophy* set thereon is going to be ejected by the updraft anyway. And if what you set there did manage to stick, you'd be enjoying it while you were outside sweating into a puddle of human leavings, outside your temperature-controlled home. Luckily we have all decided to make better choices than this.

We ignore our fireplace here. When we had the flooring and tile replaced, we didn't even bother to get the shitty beige tile around it replaced to match the rest of the house, that's how little we regarded it. I'd like to be able to tell you we were either indifferent or forgot to consider it altogether, but I can honestly say the process itself has left no impression anywhere in my brain. It's a nothing. A no-thing. It's an anti-space the human regard un-considers. If underworld demons were looking for a way to invade our dimensional plane, it would be the perfect location for their portal, guaranteed to be undetected forever. One suspects the only thing preventing that very eventuality is that even a demon has somewhere within it the capacity for embarrassment. It could never stomach the association. Better to wait it out in hell.

It will probably not surprise you to learn that I have a GREAT DEAL MORE to say about this subject of fireplaces and mantlepieces. Anything at all to not talk about the configuration of the president's penis. This is it, everyone, we've finally reached the End of News. Fill your writing spaces as best you can.

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*A first place bowling trophy, love. Anything participation-level is going to end up thirty feet away, in the dog run (not entirely inappropriately). Try harder.