A Lamentable Fire

First and most obviously, a detailed update on my gastrointestinal status after last week's debacle: I am fairly confident now that it wasn't a virus, it was low-level food poisoning, probably from a recently opened Chipotle location, where we picked up food en route to my son's pace to watch his beloved Oregon Ducks get absolutely atomized by An Ohio State University. If it were a virus, my appetite would have come roaring back after the bout of fever and sleepiness, but it's been very slow going with regard to eating and other post-eating functionalities I will demurely decline to detail for you, in the subsequent week. Suffice it to say there's been even more ginger ale consumed.

The details of my personal digestive tract have failed to make the broadcast news as everything since then has been dominated by the fact that Southern California, where I live, is once again an active hellscape of flames and randomized uncertainty. For clarity, I want to say that while I live in SoCal, I do not live in LA, so I'm watching events unfold from the safety of remote news feeds, like most everyone else. But as the Santa Ana winds continue to test the grip strength of my house's terra cotta roof tiles for the third or fourth straight day, it's a very there-but-for-the-grace-of-Yahweh sort of feeling. We did this dance out here as recently as this past July, when I watched with many of my neighbors from the top of a hill as helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft made circuits between a nearby lake and the chaparral brush right behind our houses to drop load after load of water. We're lucky that the wind direction and convenient location of the lake helped knock ours down pretty quickly and that the area burned (in that fire and in the much larger one a couple of miles away that started almost simultaneously) was pretty open and undeveloped. The ones in the Palisades and San Fernando Valley are already much larger and in the immediate vicinity of neighborhoods of varying densities, in difficult landscape way more conducive to fire than earthbound humans and their fire suppression.

From fifty miles away, my sense of empathy and fear grips like anxious nausea.* The hardest part about any of this is seeing snippets or hearing back second-hand (I'm not going anywhere close to indulging any of it by seeking it out, let alone willingly soaking in it) responses ranging from gleeful political point-scoring to the no-longer-appropriate-to-describe-as-"outlandish" conspiracy theorizing to the sadistic outright cheering for people to struggle, to suffer and die. Which is, I guess just where we are as a country. It wasn't that long ago that we started saying "die in a fire" as a hyperbolic way to close out a ranting thought aimed at people with whom you disagreed (primarily in print), but we're at the point now where the performative rhetoricism of it has dwindled down to an imperceptible scant. The lived reality now is that between a persistent (even dominant) environment of misinformation and the by-the-day improvement in the capabilities for deep fakes and large language models, there's more out there that isn't real than is. I'd take it more personally, but it's affecting the people perpetuating the lies in the areas affected by similarly scaled disasters as those of us out here on the ribbons and strands of Cultural Elitestan. In the latter cases I guess you sit back and root for the fires, in the former you go out and point guns at FEMA workers trying to help you.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, we've been wondering what the definitional aspects of American culture would be once we didn't have the dirty commies to scream at/about anymore. For a while it really did look like the Forever War would be the paradigm, in the endless occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. How many more countries could we add to the list as pointless drains for both American taxpayer dollars and international goodwill? Well, it turned out those couldn't last forever, so instead we've turned to our own class of Tech Bro, some homegrown, some illegally imported, to usher in a definitive age of monetized bullshit at the expense of, well, literally everyone, none of the stakes of which or actual cost we'll be clear about until it's far, far too late.

The image is a red, white and blue boxing glove, punching itself in the dick, forever.

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*OK, when you're recovering from food poisoning recovery, everything feels like nausea, so maybe a little lazy, but still not inappropriate