I Am A Servant of the Secret Fire

It's easy to be contemptible about the things with which we are most familiar. They lack the benefit of novelty, that rush of discovery and intellectual lust that creates a grace-period of benevolent blindness to the tics and faults one can only come to starkly and horribly appreciate by sticking it out for the long haul. You can certainly dislike someone you've just met, but you can only really hate the people closest to you. It's the kind of dynamic that makes Thanksgiving so very special.

As as kid of course I hated the place I was from. All young people say the same thing about their hometowns: they're boring, they're for old people, there's nothing to do. Of course it seems that way when we're young, when the only people who seem to be able to do what they want are the people with the jobs and the cars and all the disposable income they're wasting on vegetables and rent when they could be blowing it all on Legos and Kool-Aid. I'm frustrated just thinking about it now and I'm 44.

But kids don't mean "boring" when they say things are boring, what they mean is "predictable." The schedule is laid out for school, the weekends have a rhythm of yardwork and general recrimination, the same meals cycle through week after week, and even when you do go anywhere, the landscape is all the same, day after day, place after place... Show me the world's most painfully verdant panorama, a John Muir fever dream blessed with the vertical awe of grand-scale botany and the vast horizontal sweep of planetary geography, with susurrations of starlings cloud-dancing over the flash of leaping dolphin pods, and I'll find you a teenager living nearby who is, oh my god, so over it.

This is all my way of saying: I don't think Californians, my brethren and... sistren? I don't know the lady-word for that, but let's not risk being predictably binary anyway and just say My Peoples. I don't think my peoples are a stupid peoples. Yes, I see them every day, so the dumb shit they (and I) do REALLY tends to stand out. Look, just this week I tried to make a left turn onto a one-way street that really, really, really didn't go that direction. If I want grace in my moments of terror-inducing thought-lapses, I have to be prepared to extend my cohabitants the same generosity.

And after all we have 8 million registered Democrats and only about 4.6 million registered Republicans. And in the middle, there are 6 millions registered "no affiliation" or "other." So GOP voters in the state are at best the fourth choice of people who bother to vote. SOME things are going extraordinarily right out here.

That said, we are a little bit dumb to live here. For instance, I know in my bones, from way before I bought this house that I love, that has gestated and birthed the family that forms the core of my personhood, I live in a place that is destined for a violent end. I don't mean that existentially, like at the end of entropy when the universe sloughs apart in inevitable, inescapable, all-encompassing heat-death. I see the Camp Fire and the Woolsey Fire, the latter at minimum 75 miles from here, and I don't think "ooh, lucky us this time," but rather, "well, there's two more down before ours is coming." And it is.

I live on a hill above a canyon. I'm surrounded by chaparral and semi-desert that I love, that covers the landscape of my rain-starved little human heart. There's one main road in and out. It's all going to burn one day, now more likely than ever. It seems dark to say that, but you haven't heard me say yet that if it isn't fire, it'll be a mudslide caused by torrential sudden unlooked-for rain or the San Andreas Fault finally getting around to shaking us off, like fleas on a tectonic dog. We already have about 80 times more people crammed in this wide-open area than the local water supply can possibly support. I live on a time-bomb strapped to a rocket aimed directly at the ground.

I stood once inside Westminster Hall, an 11th century structure attached to the houses of Parliament in London. As a Californian, it was a complicated experience. I'm only barely exaggerating when I say I wasn't sure how to breathe the air in there. I was born in an aesthetic built upon a mythology of progress, where the inertia of history plows forward like a bulldozer, usually literally. Maybe we really are just vapid, shallow philistines chasing new investment money and that new-building smell at the expense of something that connects us to ancestors who predate ideas like general literacy and human equality as a social good.

Or maybe we just know we're not here for the long-haul. Nothing stands here that isn't flammable. There's nothing about timber and stucco that isn't explicitly inviting erasure, so why try really?

Well, unless you can afford private firefighters. Maybe those people can feel like they've got a shot. But literally only them.